Wakefly BlogGoogle Tag Manager- 5 Reasons Why You Should Tag Along

Many websites utilize Google Analytics to capture, process, configure, and report on their website traffic and metrics. In 2012, Google launched Tag Manager- “a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface.” This versatile tagging tool enables you to easily add and update your own tags, without major website development work or manual code changes. Integrating both Google Analytics and Tag Manager across your website allows you to manage and optimize your website traffic more efficiently.

Here are 5 reasons why you should be “tagging” along:

1) Your Wallet Will Thank You

The best part about Google Tag Manager (similarly with Google Analytics) is it’s FREE! Google Tag Manager offers many features such as Tag Technology, Usability, User Permissions and Accounts, Tag Firing Rules, and Supported Tags, all at no cost and ready to use. Implementing Google Tag Manager across your website reduces the hassle of tedious and manual code editing. It allows your marketing team members to add and update tags on the website- JavaScript code snippets, web analytics, remarketing, third party integrations, to name a few. Before Google Tag Manager, webmasters had to pay for these types of services and features, the best things in life are free!

2) The Need for Speed

Before Google Tag Manager, you would have to update your website tracking and tagging through hard-coding, which is time-consuming. Now, marketers can maintain and manage all the tags, and increase their website tracking efficiency. There are many websites that need various tags implemented in the code to deliver key data insights, these tags may clutter the website- which can affect the page speed and likely cause user experience issues. Google Tag Manager replaces all of your tracking and marketing tags with a single, asynchronously loading tag (code snippet placed on your web page’s HTML), this tag will help your page speed because it fires faster without disrupting your site.

3) Easy Peasy

Google Tag Manager works as a central hub to easily add and manage tags, set when and where they should fire, and optimize (based on specific rules you set). This user-friendly web interface tool allows you to make changes to your tags whenever you want, without rewriting or editing the code on your website. You can control who has access and user permissions to ensure no one will publish a tag that could break the site. Google Tag Manager also has a feature called workspaces, which allows you to create “multiple and differing sets of changes to your container. Different users and teams can work on these sets of changes in separate workspaces to independently develop and test tag configurations.”

4) Sneak Peek Before You Publish

To verify that your tags and triggers are firing properly, Google Tag Manager has a feature called Preview and Debug. This allows you to view your website and inspect what tags are fired, as if your drafted tags were deployed. Once you enable the preview mode and load your website, a debugger pane will be displayed to show you which tags are fired, and the order in which it was fired. In addition, you can also view the event tags you’ve fired within the Real-Time reports in your Google Analytics account, to validate that the tags are firing properly. But don’t worry, since you have not published the tags, it will not skew your data.

5) Migrate Without the Migraines

If your website only has Google Analytics implemented, and you want to board the Google Tag Manager train, you can migrate with little work. Here are steps you would need to follow:

• Create and implement Google Tag Manager account
• Add Pageview Tracking tag in GTM
• Replicate Events (if applicable) in GTM
• Test to ensure Pageview tag in GTM is firing
• Remove old GA code (work with a developer if needed)
• Publish tags and make it live!

Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool that should be implemented across your website. This free tool reduces manual development work, increases tagging efficiency, and maximizes your time to optimize your website. So get tagging!