How much time are users actually using on your site?
I'm Olivia with Whole Whale, and today we are going to look at how to set up a timer
with Google Tag Manager.
Okay, but I hear you saying "what is Google Tag Manager, I already have Google Analytics
on my site, what does this thing do?"
If Google Analytics is like having an air conditioner in your house and you have one
in the living room, you have one in the bedroom, you have one in the office, Google Tag Manager
is like central air.
So rather than having to go from room to room turning on different machines, this one controls
the entire flow around the house.
Its great for getting more granular with what people are actually doing on your website.
So as we've said before, Google Analytics is not very smart out of the box: We have
to teach it what we want to track.
Google Tag Manager lets us get one step even deeper with that tracking so we can know not
only when people are clicking on certain links but we can know when exactly they are clicking
them.
We can track things like scroll depth on pages, videos watched, and we can see how many people
are actually spending 15 seconds on our site.
Why 15 seconds?
We have found this to be, from our own experience and from best practices, an amount of time
that people actually absorb what they are seeing on your website.
When you look at the average time spent on-site, it's not that long.
The problem is Google Analytics on its own doesn't know to count this, so for the most
part with sessions it will count this as a bounce even if someone has spent a significant
amount of time on your site but they haven't taken any further action.
So we can set up this timer to get a real sense of true bounce rate.
Okay, once you're logged into Google Tag Manager, click on "tags" and then "new."
You're going to want to name your tag in line with what you want to track, so we'll call
this one 15 second timer.
And then we are going to click "tag configuration."
You'll see a number of options for tag type, Google Tag Manager makes choosing one super
easy.
We're going to use the first one for "Universal Analytics," this will be the tag type for
most simple configurations.
We're going to track this as an event and for "category" we will type in "visit," in
"action" we'll type in "15 seconds," and the label if going to be "page path."
You'll want to start by typing in 2 curly open parentheses {{, and then when you see
"page path" come up in the list click on that.
Now I want you to also pay attention to non-interaction hit.
So in GA, bounce rate is calculated by the number of single page sessions divided by
all sessions for each page.
This means that GA is looking for any interaction on a page, so if you set your non-interaction
hit to "false," this means that your bounce rate will be affected.
If you don't want this to affect your bounce rate, simply change this to "true," but since
we do want our bounce rate to be affected by our 15 second timer, that's why we're setting
one up, we 're going to go ahead and keep it set to false.
Now we're going to want to hit save and choose a trigger to tell GTM when to fire your tag,
and since we already have a trigger set for a 15 second timer, we're going to go ahead
and work with that.
But if we were setting this up from scratch, here's how we'd want to configure it: We'd
want to keep the trigger type as a timer, that's very easy to select, and once you've
hit timer in that other section, you're going to see that the event name is automatically
populated, and for an interval we're going to have to do a little bit of math here.
Calculate 15 seconds in milliseconds, and for limit we're going to want to make this
once per session.
And since we want this to apply to all pages across the site, we can change this URL to
"matches RegEx," or "Regular Expression," followed by a period and an asterisk to make
the event fire on all pages of the site.
Once we've configured this trigger, we're going to hit save twice, right up to the right.
Once for the trigger and then once for the tag.
Once that's set up, we're going to want to enter preview mode, this is going to help
us verify and debug our tags because it is very easy to introduce a bug into Google Tag
Manager, not through our own fault, just tech doing what it does.
Once we've entered preview mode, we can go onto our website and we're going to see that
there is a preview mode that comes up bottom center.
and we can see our tags here, we can see what is firing, what is not firing, all you have
to do is spend 15 seconds on the site, maybe give it a little bit of a scroll, and we're
going to see that tag fire.
So once you are ready to verify you're going to hit "publish," and "submit."
And you are going to push that 15 second timer live on your site.
So once you have this timer set up on your Google Tag Manager, you can get a truer sense
of bounce rate and get a truer sense of how visitors are interacting with your site's
content.
I'm Olivia with Whole Whale, and if you want to get an even more granular sense with how
people are engaging with the content on your site, and how you can do even better, we have
a whole course for that on content to drive impact, both from the technical and writing
parts of SEO.
You can access that course at wholewhale.com/university and you can even access it for a discount
with the code WWVIDEO.