In this video we're going to talk about Google Analytics versus Google Tag Manager.
All and more coming up.
Hey there measuregeeks. Julian here back with another video for you. Now, you might be thinking
this doesn't quite make sense, Google Analytics versus Google Tag Manager? Then you're pretty
advanced already in Google
Tag Manager or Google Analytics for that matter, and
know exactly the differences. But a lot of beginners are asking themselves do they use
Google Tag Manager or should I use Google Analytics? And we've going to discover in
this video why this question doesn't quite make sense, how these tools are actually different,
and how you can utilize them together or separate. Now we got lots to cover. So let's dive in.
So first of all, we need to talk about what Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are
all about. Google Analytics is a tracking tool. You can install it on your website or
your mobile apps and it will gather data for you which you can later analyze. Now you install
a little bit of tracking code onto your website then measures the data, transfers it over
to Google Analytics there it gets processed and stored on Google servers. And once all
this data is ready, we'll be able to view it in a nice user interface where we can do
much more to the data, we can analyze it, segment it, filter it, move it around. So
we get to that sweet insights which will help us to understand our users better on our website
or mobile app. Now, Google Analytics is a very powerful tool. And it has competitors
like mixpanel or Adobe analytics, and is obviously very popular because it's free.
Google Tag Manager, on the other hand, is a tag management system. Now the basic premise
behind it is that you want to install tracking onto your website and this normally happens
through tracking codes. So for example, the Google Analytics tracking code, the Facebook
Pixel, or the Google Ads conversion tracking, you need to install this onto your page. Normally,
you get a little bit of JavaScript code that you should place inside of the head of your
HTML on your website. Now, once you want to get a little bit more advanced with your tracking
deployment, you can utilize a tag management system, like Google Tag Manager. Now, the
whole basic behind it is that you get one central JavaScript snippet that you install
on all your pages. And henceforth, you can deploy all your tracking codes through a central
management interface of Google Tag Manager. You just go ahead and add a tag in your tag
management system. And then the code will be deployed in the back end automatically.
This means you don't really have to touch the code anymore or have to install this manually
on your website. A big advantage with a tag management system. And as the name says, you
can then manage all your different tracking codes within the management interface of Google
Tag Manager. There's so much more to it, but I I won't get into this right now.
So you see, there's actually a big difference between what Google Analytics does and what
Google tag manager does. So where does the confusion actually come from? Well first of
all, they're both Google products. They're both for free. But what you can do with Google
Analytics is actually take your tracking code and install it onto your page manually which
would be placing a tracking tag onto your page yourself. Well, you could also do this
through Google Tag Manager which means you can take the tag of Google Analytics and deploy
through Google Tag Manager. And many other tools as well like the Facebook Pixel or the
Google Ads conversion tracking. Now, deploying through Google Tag Manager makes sense if
you have multiple tracking codes available which you may want to install on certain sites
on your website, or under certain conditions, like when a user clicks a button or he scrolls
down. This would be pretty hard to do with a single tracking code because you would need
to write some JavaScript. And Google Tag Manager takes us all over for you. So in a sense,
you can utilize the Google Analytics tracking code within Google Tag Manager to deploy your
tracking codes
more effectively and in an advanced way.
So there's where the both tools come together, you can utilize them together. But you could
also utilize them separately. So you could take your Google Analytics tracking code and
deploy this onto your page without using Google Tag Manager. On the other hand, you could
also utilize Google Tag Manager and not deploy the Google Analytics tracking code, but rather
just deploy the Facebook Pixel or your Adobe analytics tag or any other tags from other
tag vendors. In a sense, Google Tag Manager is really just the middle piece between the
implementation on your website and the tracking tool where the data gets Central.
So in conclusion, who will win, Google Analytics versus Google Tag Manager? Well as we have
discovered in this video, there are no not really the same. Google Analytics is a tracking
tool itself. And Google Tag Manager is a tag management system which deploys your tracking
tag. You can utilize both tools together to deploy, for example, the Google Analytics
tracking code through Google Tag Manager. You can also utilize them separately, installing
the Google Analytics code directly onto your page and using Google Tag Manager maybe for
other tracking codes. But there are no real similarities between these tools. They also
have their respective competitors in their space. A tracking tool or an analytics tool,
click stream tracking tool has, for example, competitors like Mixpanel or Adobe Analytics.
And in the tag management side we have Insighten or Adobe DTM which is now called Launch, which
is their respective counterpart. So I hope this cleared up some confusion around Google
Analytics versus Google Tag Manager. Which one should you use? I would recommend to use
both tools because they're both free and are both pretty awesome. If you want to learn
more about Google Analytics, then we have a Google Analytics for beginners class which
helps you to go through in five short lessons through the most important features of this
tool and helps you to understand Google Analytics more thoroughly. On the other side, we also
have a Google Tag Manager for beginners course which takes you through the most important
stages of a setup of Google Tag Manager. So how to deploy tracking codes and the features
that are included inside of Google Tag Manager. So definitely check that out in the description
down below. And as always, if this hasn't quite answered your question and you still
have some confusion, I love to hear from you in the comments down below and see what you
have to say. And if you haven't yet, maybe consider subscribing right over there because
we bring new videos just like this one every week. Now, my name is Julian see in the next
one.