In this lesson, we're going to plan out our migration and set up a tag plan.
All and more, coming up.
Hey there and welcome back to another video of measureschool.com teaching you the data-driven
away of digital marketing.
My name is Julian.
And in this third lesson of our GTM for beginner series, we are going to go into the planning
stages.
This is very important before we implement anything with Google Tag Manager.
We need to be aware of what we actually want to implement.
And in this lesson, we're going to plan out a migration of Google Tag Manager.
So if we have any kind of data already gathering on our systems, we want to make sure that
we document this in a tag plan.
And then we'll be ready to actually put it into place in Google Tag Manager that will
ensure data quality, which is very important, and give us some documentation.
So if we everyone need to explain or try to figure out what we have implemented in the
first place, we can refer back to a document.
And that's where I came up with the tag plan, which I'm also gonna link up in the description
down below.
So if you want to check that out, you can download it and make a copy for yourself.
But now we've got lots to cover so let's dive in.
Welcome back to Google Tag Manager.
Now, Google Tag Manager is a great tool to organize your tools and deploy new tags.
But in most of the cases, you're not actually working with a brand new website, but there
are already tags installed on your website.
And we would need to migrate them over to Google Tag Manager.
The first step that we want to take in this lesson is planning out our implementation.
So we would look at our website.
What tracking do we have installed?
What tracking would we need to transport over to Google Tag Manager?
And generally document our journey so we'll be able to decipher our tracking later on
and where was it implemented.
At this stage, I would encourage you to talk to anybody who is involved in the website
that might have something to do with the tracking.
It might be marketing people or developers who have installed the tracking code on your
website.
There might be already some kind of documentation of what was installed or sense of what tools
I actually used that gather data on your website.
Unfortunately, sometimes it's the case that nothing was documented, nobody really knows
what tracking codes are installed.
And if the website is a little bit older, it might be that many codes are installed
that are not used anymore.
Even though Google Tag Manager later on gives us an interface where we can see all the different
codes, we may want to document them beforehand.
So we don't run into the same problem in a few years when we are trying to figure out
our tracking again.
So I encourage you to audit your tracking beforehand, what do you have installed, and
then plan out your future implementation.
And that's why it's very handy to come up with a tag plan.
Now, this is something that you can do outside of Google Tag Manager, I do it here in a spreadsheet.
But any format would really work.
And this is a little template that I came up with where we will document our progress.
And what we want to implement with Google Tag Manager later on.
This document will be super helpful if anybody from your team asked you what tracking codes
do we have installed, or future employees or freelancers that join to help you out with
the website and ask you what the tracking configuration looks like.
So here, we can enter all the tools, we will look at the different pages that we have that
are relevant for tracking and any kind of event interaction tracking and audience tracking.
Now, we will do this on the example of our demo shop.
Depending on your website, how big it is, how many people are involved, and the kind
of tools who are running, this can be much more complex.
I want to keep it simple here and just go through an example.
So let's say I have talked to my team, they told me they are using Google Analytics, Google
Ads, and also the facebook pixel.
So I have a little bit of a sense of what might be installed on the website.
And the first hint if something is installed is actually looking into the page source.
So we right click here on view page source.
And this will give us our HTML that was downloaded.
We have obviously our Google Tag Manager installed.
And if we scroll down, we can look at all the different codes that might be installed
here, especially in the head section of the website.
And we see a global site tag here from Google Analytics.
And we also see the facebook Pixel.
So that gives us a hint of what is installed on this page.
If you don't want to really look through code, you can also install browser extensions that
will help you with this.
One of these extensions is the tag assistant by Google.
I have it installed here and it will show us which tags are from Google.
The marketing vendor install, we have Google Tag Manager obviously.
Additionally, we have the global side tag which deploys our Google Ads remarketing and
Google Analytics tag.
Facebook has a similar extension called the facebook Pixel Helper where we can see okay,
this page, the page view is tracked with the facebook Pixel.
But if you have different other marketing vendors, there might be extensions out there
that are specialized to tell you what data is sent over from those tools.
If you want to have a more general one, you can get the wasp Inspector, which will add
functionality to your Chrome Developer Tools, which you can find under more tools, then
here under developer tools.
We see a new tab down here, which is wasp.
And if we reload this page, it will give us a lot of information of what marketing tags
were found, and where they actually coming from.
Very helpful tool that I've been using for a while.
And I definitely recommend it.
With that information, we can go ahead and fill out our sheet here.
So we have as a tool, Google Analytics
and Google Ads.
And we also are running the facebook Pixel.
Now these are all active and gathering data.
You could go obviously into your tools and check whether they are still used.
And give a little bit of a description for Google Analytics.
We are doing basic page view tracking for Google Ads.
We are actually doing remarketing with this tag.
And the facebook Pixel is also remarketing and conversion tracking.
Then you can put in some notes.
I would encourage you if you want to be fast later and know where data is going to actually
look up certain configurations.
In our case for Google Analytics, we can log into our Google Analytics account and go to
the right account and look into the configurations how it's actually configured.
So I'm going to go to my demo account here,
look under the admin section, and then actually look up the tracking code that would need
to be installed.
And right here we have our tracking ID.
This is the piece of information that I need later on for my tag deployment.
I'm going to enter this into the notes.
We also have our Google Ads.
Let's go over to our Google Ads account, here under Tools, we can go to conversions.
And here we find our purchase tracking code that is installed.
Let's click through and look at the tag set up.
And here, we already find Google Tag Manager.
And we would need to have the conversion ID.
So let's input that here.
And we also have the facebook pixel.
Now again, we can go into our tool, Facebook, and look this up right here.
It depends on your implementation what data you would need.
In our case, it's this ID here, which we also saw in our plugin.
So here's the facebook pixel ID, this is something I would need later on.
Now, again, you can see how this might be useful if you have multiple codes running.
And you want to figure out where to which account is what data sent and overall it just
helps us with the documentation for later reference.
So that is it.
This is a pretty small implementation of these three tools.
We don't have any thing else installed on our little demo store here.
So let's think about of what additional information we want to track later on with Google Tag
Manager.
And this is important because we want to purposefully build in tracking on to our website.
We don't want to take the approach of just mindlessly deploying any kind of tracking,
see what data we can get, and then forget about it.
But rather purposefully built in the tracking gather data that we want and get insights
from that.
Otherwise, we face the problem of data overwhelm where
we have a lot of data available, but don't really know what to do with it.
So let's take a look at this website here and write down some pages that might be important
for us.
On a shop, we obviously have the homepage, the product pages, we have maybe the interaction
of the add to cart click, we have the cart.
And if you go further, we have actually the most important part of an online store, which
is the thank you page or the order confirm page which is right here.
This is a page that will become very important for our tracking later on.
Because we want to use this as a conversion goal in our later tracking deployment.
So I want to remember this page.
And I'm going to do this by copying the URL here, it's go over two pages.
And the path that we had this is the exact path.
We have a little bit of a description.
And any kind of notes that we want to put in.
This is our thank you page.
Again, you could do this much more extensive here and put in different other page templates
or important pages that are relevant to your tracking later on.
Now, let's talk about some interaction, some events that we want to track later on.
And this is really the power of Google Tag Manager.
We will be able to track any kind of clicks or form submit on an online store, I would
say an important interaction are button clicks here on the Add to Cart button, for example.
So let's put that into our tag plan.
So we have that available later on and know what to do when we implement.
Now, there's another idea here the audiences if you wanted to build custom audiences, for
example, with the facebook pixel, that's also something you could define here in order to
build that into your tracking.
With this very limited and small tracking plan.
We want to go into the next video and start migrating over our existing tracking into
Google Tag Manager, and also build in our new tracking and send it on to our tools with
the help of Google Tag Manager.
All right, so there you have it.
This is how you can plan out your migration audit a little bit of your account and then
put that into a tag plan.
Now I know the examples that I've given a little bit simplified.
Probably, if you have a bigger company, you probably have more pages that you need to
go through and put this all in.
But trust me, if you put it all into a tab plan beforehand, you don't forget anything.
And you don't wake up with faulty data because something was forgotten or not re implemented
into Google Tag Manager.
With that in place.
We are now ready to take this to the next step and actually implement tags with Google
Tag Manager and get into the weeds of it.
So join me for the next lesson.
If you haven't yet, consider subscribing to this channel right over there because the
new lesson will obviously come out next week.
Now, my name is Julian.
See you on the next lesson.