Google Tag Manager: An Ultimate Solution for Data-Driven Marketing

The classical phrase ‘time is money’ perfectly applies to today’s competitive business environment, especially in marketing. The longer you take to manage your business marketing campaigns, the greater the likelihood is to miss out important sales opportunities. Information regarding engagement metrics and event tracking is significant for enterprises to take key business decisions. Waiting for developers and your IT team to add tags on your website or to get insight into how customers use your website and marketing activities impact conversion can influence your bottom line. Let your IT team handle other higher-priority tasks and empower your marketing team to create, edit and publish tags on websites with the help of Google Tag Manager to keep your business on top of digital marketing trends.

What is Google Tag Manager (GTM)?

It is a free tag management solution to deploy marketing and analytics tags on mobile apps and websites. This Tag Management System (TMS) empowers marketers to manage their website tags easily without doing any changes to the site codes. GTM has emerged as an essential solution for website owners, managers and SEO experts to enable them to deploy code on business sites for site analytics and remarketing. Additionally, it is impossible to track everything on Google Analytics alone so tag managers can help create valuable reports offering real-time insights. This tool allows the administration to manage tracking codes on a website in a user-friendly interface. They no longer need to depend on developers or prior complex coding knowledge. The initial setup may need developer support. Moreover, this free software is not a replacement for developers but has streamlined simple coding implementation e.g. engagement metrics and event tracking. Besides, you can also add different kinds of tags to your site. It was very difficult for the developers in the past to maintain and update the countless codes to track. Without GTM, the process of creating and managing Google tags, their integration with other tools, maintenance and upgradation of tracking codes and knowledge about the data usage can be complex and time-consuming tasks.

Three Pillars of Google Tag Manager

GTM contains three main pillars: tags, triggers and variables to understand the requirements and conditions of data collection along with storage information. You can use them to track user interactions to acquire deeper knowledge of user behaviour.

• What are tags? Typically, Google Tag Manager helps to manage your website codes. A tag concerning GTM defines as a code snippet which you add to a site including, but not limited to, an AdWords tag, a Google Analytics tag, a Facebook Pixel tag etc. In the language of GTM, they are termed tags. GTM consists of built-in templates for marketing and analytics to easily add tags to your website. These prepackaged segments of code send data on your selected analytics platform. Moreover, they allow you to integrate different products on your website to track ROI and strategy efficiency. GTM supports different tag types but you can also select custom tag types and can use the Community Template Gallery created by other users.
• What do triggers do?This second important pillar of GTM determines when to execute or fire a particular tag to capture user behaviour and track an event. Though clicks, form submissions and pageview are a few built-in triggers in GTM for common interactions, users can also take benefit from custom triggers to respond to unique features on their website. They are connected to particular tags that enable them to fire in case of any event. After identifying and detecting an event, triggers notify your tag. Without a trigger, a tag cannot be executed or fired.
• What are Variables?These placeholders in GMT collect information on your website and pass it to tags and triggers to make your tracking accurate. A variable in GMT only becomes populated when linked with a trigger, tag or any other variable. Built-in and user-defined variables are two types of variables in GMT. Tag manager does not allow the customization of built-in variables and they collect common data like page URL, form elements, click elements, and so forth. Conversely, user-defined variables are custom variables that collect specific information not offered by built-in variables. Typically, variables offer two main functionalities. They deliver dynamic information (values that change on the action) to Google Analytics in tags e.g. product price, name etc. Another function is within triggers to determine the condition a tag must fire. Companies can take benefit from user-defined variables in case of having specific requirements.

What is GMT Used For?

The tag manager by Google offers various features that fulfil multiple requirements with some typical uses including:

• Implementation and management of tracking codes of Google Analytics
• Support event and conversion tracking
• Streamline remarketing and advertising efforts
• Allow user Behavior analysis
• Facilitate social media and e-commerce tracking
• Tag sequencing and load management
• Deployment of Meta Pixel
• A/B testing

In the context of SEO, tag managers allow monitoring of user interaction with your website, identification of conversion rates, and sometimes testing.

The Relationship between GTM & SEO

After implementing an SEO strategy, businesses need to track their progress to understand the glitches. Tech Bridge Consultancy Google Tag Manager offers you insights about users' interaction with your website and the impacts of your SEO strategy. For this purpose, the monitoring of conversion matrices e.g. transactions and form submissions is important. Conversions vary in terms of meanings for different enterprises and website types. Universal Analytics users can easily and directly track e-commerce data in analytics. They require GTM only when the conversions become impossible to track with UA. Likewise, GA4 users can collect e-commerce data through GTM.

Link Between Conversion & SEO Strategy

It is important to know the aim of your SEO activities for instance:

• Enhance Website Traffic The main purpose of site optimization for SEO is to enhance traffic. There are some additional aims too including increasing leads, sales, engagement and awareness of your brand. All this depends on your website type and business priorities. Implementation of tags keeping in view these metrics empowers you to monitor performance and provide knowledge about additional opportunities. For instance, your SEO activities aim to enhance your sales, this may require optimization of the product and its category pages. In the case of using GA4, you can implement tags for different button clicks e.g. ‘shop now’ and ‘add to cart’. The successful optimization will enhance the metrics after some time. However, it is important to consider industry and seasonality factors that may affect your metrics.
• Increase Website Engagement In the event your SEO activities focus on enhancing engagement, you should focus on optimizations that keep your users intact with your website e.g. internal links, interactive page elements and optimized content. By implementing tags to monitor link clicks and scroll depth, you can check the success or failure of these strategies. In this way, you can gain insight into types of user-preferred content, your content positioning, link placement and so forth. For instance, the user will avoid scrolling down on your webpage in case of missing content.
• Increase Leads If your SEO strategy aims to enhance leads, you should optimize service pages and promote form submissions. By implementing tracking on ‘contact us’ and ‘form submission’ button clicks, you can analyze the insight of those who actually contact or those only looking for it. The prolonged contact form can detract users so try to keep it short. Google Tag Manager offers insights about SEO progress and new opportunities for all websites. Meanwhile, larger sites can perform A/B testing with it. With A/B testing, you can test varied content types, user interfaces, layouts and button colours etc.

Key Advantages of Using Google Tag Manager

• It allows fast deployment of tracking codes.
• It serves as a central hub to control and track all tags in one place.
• This tool reduces dependence or reliance on developers and limits their involvement.
• It offers user permission control to authorized persons only.
• GMT allows easy configuration of many famous tools and can easily integrate with various marketing tools.
• This software reduces the burden on your IT team.
• Your website not only loads faster but GMT also reduces the likelihood of downtimes.

Final Words

Although tagging is important, still it's a time-consuming and risky task. However, Tech Bridge Consultancy’s Google Tag Manager can empower your marketing team to set tags and triggers effortlessly, streamlines processes and reduce reliance on developers. Indeed, GMT has transformed the way website owners manage tracking codes and tags. Ready to join hands with us? Contact us now to make data-driven decisions and improve user experiences.