Hey everyone, Jason here digital marketing consultant and in this marketing Quick Start
guide you're going to learn what the heck Google Analytics and Google tag manager are
and most importantly, how they're going to help you with your digital marketing.
I'll link up in the cards in the description to deep dive tutorials on how to set this
up for your own websites and business here.
We're going to look at comparing them, how they're different and most importantly, how
they're going to be helpful to you and your business.
So let's jump right in we're gonna kick things off with Google Analytics.
So what the heck is Google Analytics?
Well, in short Google Analytics is using the power of Google's tracking on your website.
So Google Analytics once the code is on your site, we'll get to more on that in a bit,
you'll be able to see how many people have visited your site, the average time they spent,
what pages they visited, where they left and you can even dig deeper and see demographics
like age and gender.
Google has their own kind of organization system for different types of people based
upon what they're interested in or what they're currently shopping for, so you'll be able
to see these custom audiences created by Google as well.
And the creepiest feature you can actually get really, really detailed on exactly where
people are.
So when you're looking at location data for people who visited your site, you can go by
country, you can go by state, province or region, and then you can get really detailed
and actually zoom in to a state or province local neighborhoods zip codes down to the
actual city.
It's actually a little creepy, but the good news is you're not actually going to be able
to see the exact person who that was.
All of the data inside of Google Analytics is anonymous.
Although it is still a little creepy that we can all use the power of Google to literally
see exactly where almost every single person was, when they visited our site.
Now, on top of being able to see all of that data a creepy or not, there is another big
feature of Google Analytics that you absolutely should be using.
In fact if you were to do one thing as a result of watching this video, it would actually
be using Google tag manager, but with said that in a bit but.
The second thing you would do is use UTM parameter.
So I'm gonna link up in the cards in the description to a video that goes through it.
It's three times as long as one, because it is a little complex.
But all UTM parameters do is they allow you to give additional information to Google Analytics,
so you can actually start to understand how your traffic sources are performing on your
site.
So go ahead and take a look at this slide you see here, that this is a standard URL
with a bunch of information after it.
And if we break it down, there are actually five little pieces of information you can
send over to Google Analytics and there's a tutorial in the description we'll walk you
through how to set this up, but all we're doing is telling Google Analytics exactly
where the traffic came from.
And what's really cool is after a few months, you can look at reports like this one.
You can see down to the exact add video blog post that actually drove the action that you
were looking for.
So you can see “hey, maybe video one is actually responsible for 90% of your sales”,
right?
So that type of information is incredibly powerful.
So the second thing you do after watching this video would be setting up UTM links.
Now, the first thing you would want to do is install Google tag manager.
So that's gonna be the second tool we're talking about here now Google tag manager is almost
nothing like Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is all about collecting data and helping you understand how your site visitors
are performing are not performing, right?
How your site is performing it and how your website visitors are behaving, there we go--
and then also telling you where the traffic came from and which traffic sources are working
best for you.
Google tag manager on the other hand, is just a file cabinet.
That's it.
It's super boring.
It does it doesn't do anything other than that.
It is just a virtual file cabinet for all of your tracking codes.
So just like Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, even Google Ads, they
all have codes that they want you to put on your website, so that you can better understand
your campaigns performance and of course run remarketing ads.
Those are ads that you show to people who've already visited your site.
Of course, all of these different platforms want you to put their code on your site, so
they can do their crazy little tracking thing and allow you to better run your campaigns.
Well, it can be kind of a mess installing one thing here and another thing there, so
what Google tag manager does is it takes all that information and it puts it into one nice
easy to find place.
So you create a free Google tag manager account and then you create something called containers
and then inside that container, you put all the tags you'd ever want to put on your site.
So all your tracking codes go inside that container instead of random places across
your site and of course the big advantage here as you can see with this screenshot from
Google tag manager, you can see all of your tags on one place and maybe more importantly
you can see when they are supposed to fire, because obviously a remarketing tag that wants
to collect every one should fire on all your pages, whereas if you're trying to track who
actually purchased a product or service, then you only want the tag to fire or pixel to
fire on a specific page.
And so you can do all that tracking and fun advanced stuff inside of Google tag manager
and you only have to paste one piece of code on your site.
It is an absolute game changer and that is the first thing I recommend doing so let's
go ahead and go onto our last section, which is your tracking plan.
Even if you already have tracking codes on your site right now, that's okay.
Go ahead and install Google tag manager first, I’ll link up in the cards in the description
to a full-blown Google tag manager course.
It will walk you click by click every single step to get Google tag manager on your site.
So the very first thing you want to do after watching this video get Google tag manager
on your site.
And then any codes you already have on your site, you're going to take them off your site
and put them inside of Google tag manager.
And then of course, you can move on with some more advanced things like UTM links and of
course conversion tracking.
So I sincerely hope you got some value out of this video.
And most importantly, you have a much better understanding of what Google Analytics does
versus what Google tag manager does.
So if you still have any questions or I just talked when you do fast, because I got too
excited about this, go ahead and drop a comment in the comment section below, because I do
still read and reply to every single one.
And make sure you check out those links to how to install Google tag manager on your
site, get everything set up and then step number two those UTM links.
So go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe for more marketing videos just like this one
and until the next, keep building the business you love.