Google Tag Manager (GTM) is one of those Google features that’s easy to overlook, but it’s versatile, valuable, and powerful. This intuitive tool is intended to make tracking and analytics easier than ever by simplifying the process of managing tags.
For those who use GTM on their website, there are major potential savings in design and development that would typically be needed to make key changes in third-party services.
What Is Google Tag Manager?
As the name implies, Google Tag Manager helps you keep track of tags – those little snippets of JavaScript data that facilitate the sending of data to third parties on your website or your mobile app.
You can think of GTM as a sort of catch-all that helps you accelerate the process of adding other services to your website. Many such services require that JavaScript be added to particular pages – or to all pages on the site – and GTM makes that a snap.
That includes things like:
- AdWords Conversion Tracking
- AdWords Remarketing
- DoubleClick Floodlight
- Google Analytics
Instead of having your Web team manually implement all these different tools, you can use GTM as a central command center to launch, review, and update any one of them as necessary.
Google Tag Manager Makes Your Site Easier to Maintain
When changes take place in your third-party tools or in the way you want to implement them, you usually have to make major adjustments to all of the pages that contain relevant JavaScript.
Not so with Google Tag Manager: The interface makes it easy to determine which service needs to be active and on what pages. Once you’ve done some planning, GTM takes care of the code fast.
There are three major elements to how GTM works:
- Tags: These are the JavaScript code snippets that need to be added to each page.
- Triggers: These are specialized instructions for when and where tags execute.
- Variables: These store and receive the data used by the triggers and the tags.
Ideally, GTM will make it possible for you to roll out key changes to third party services without using design and development resources. It’s simple enough for the same experts who manage your marketing tech to also use it without involving the IT team.
This gives you an incredible amount of freedom to “do it yourself” while implementing all kinds of neat tools, not just Google products. It only takes minutes to set up entire software suites and adjust them with the specialized actions you want to track.
To learn more, see Google’s official GTM page.