Site iconDigital Marketing Agency | Portland PPC SEO Services | Anvil Media

An Intro to Google Tag Manager

Anvil

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a single web interface. You can add and update your own tags with just a few clicks whenever you want, and without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks.

There are three main components to Google Tag Manager: Tags, Triggers, and Variables. Aspects of each of those components will be explained below.

Tags:

Tags are tiny bits of website code that let you measure traffic and visitor behavior, understand the impact of online advertising and social channels, use remarketing and audience targeting, test and improve your site, and more.

What you used to hard code but can now implement through a tag:

In Google Tag Manager, you can deploy a tag via a template for the specific tag, or, if a template is not available for the tag you via a custom tag into which you can place your tag JavaScript. Google Tag Manager offers:

One of the templates through Google Tag Manager is for Google Analytics.

To create a tag for Google Analytics page view tracking you do the following:

  1. Create a new tag

  2. Name your tag
  3. Select the Google Analytics tag template
  4. Select whether you’re using Universal Analytics or Classic Google Analytics
  5. Once you’ve selected that you will configure your tag. To do so you’ll need your tracking ID, which looks like this UA-xxxxxx-xx. You can find that within your analytics profile.

  6. The “Enable Advertising Features checkbox” is option but it will enable display advertising features, including demographics and interest reports, remarketing, and more.
  7. Hit continue and select which trigger should apply to this page (for this page view tag for Analytics you’ll want it to fire on All Pages).
  8. Once you have created you’re tag you need to complete one of the most important steps, publishing your container. If you don’t publish your container any new tags you’ve added will not fire, or show in your container if you’re in debugging mode.

Triggers, formerly known as rules:

In web containers, triggers attached to a tag govern when the tag is fired or not fired. In web containers, a tag must have at least one trigger in order to fire. Triggers are evaluated during runtime and associated tags are fired (or not fired) when the trigger conditions are met.

A Rule triggers a tag(s) to fire:

  • Fire when URL = X
  • Fire when Event = X
  • Fire when Class = X
  • Fire when {{macro}} = X

    • A tag will fire whenever any one of its triggers are met. For example, if a tag has two triggers, one for “all pages” and another for “only page XYZ”, the tag will fire on all pages.

    A trigger that blocks a tag from firing always overrides a trigger. For example, if a tag has a trigger “all pages” and a blocking trigger “URL equals thankyou.html”, the tag will never fire on the page “thankyou.html”.

    All tag firing in Google Tag Manager is event-driven. Anytime an event is registered by Google Tag Manager, triggers from the container are evaluated and tags are fired accordingly. No tag can be fired unless an event occurs.

    An event can be a pageview, a click on a button, a form submission, or any custom event that you define. Google Tag Manager has 6 built-in event types plus a custom event option. The first step in setting up a trigger is selecting the event type associated with it. The built-in events include:

    Variables, formerly known as Macros:

    Variables are used in triggers and in tags. In triggers, they are used to define filters that specify when a particular should be executed (e.g.: to execute a pageview trigger when the URL variable is “example.com/index.html”). In tags, variables are used to capture dynamic values (e.g.: passing the transaction value and products purchased to a conversion tracking tag).

    Variable types for the web are:

    Variables you can use in tags and rules:

    Exit mobile version