What Is Google Tag Manager? How Can I Better Use It?

Have you heard much about Google Tag Manager? If you have but don’t understand it much or just haven’t heard of it at all, this post is for you.

Defining Google Tag Manager

You can think of Google Tag Manager (in a very basic way) as an extension for Google Analytics. When you’re using Google Analytics, you know there are ways to track things like button clicks and form submissions on your site. Well, Google Tag Manager makes these kinds of things much easier!

How did Google Tag Manager change the tracking game?

Before Google Tag Manager, setting up event tracking like a button click or PDF download required creating and adding a piece of code to the element that you wanted to track. With Google Tag Manager, it’s simpler than that.

How does Google Tag Manager work?

The code you put on your site to install Google Tag Manager is called a container. The container is a snippet of code that’s installed in just the same way as Google Analytics code, and is easily done by you or your developer. 

Then, you set up everything you want to track within your tag manager account. You can tell it to track PDF downloads, form submits, button clicks, link clicks - pretty much anything. You set all of this up within your Google Analytics account, without having to touch your website’s code again.

What should I do next to get started with Google Tag Manager?

All of this makes it easier to quickly set up tracking for almost anything on your site, without needing help from your developer. Take a look at your website. What would be cool if you could know how many times it’s getting clicked? Maybe there’s a button, a link, a PDF download, a form, or a video you want to see clicks on. You can track all those with Google Tag Manager!

Want help setting up a Google Tag Manager account? ArcStone can help!