If you are responsible for a website, you’ll need to track the results of your digital marketing activity – and sooner or later that will mean that you’ll be needing to put some ‘tags’ onto your website for tracking purposes. Tags are snippets of code that need to be added to your site – traditionally this would have needed to be done by a web developer.
Using a tag management system, however, offers a number of key benefits. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tag management system provided by Google. It offers a streamlined solution for managing various tracking codes and tags without the need to edit the code on your website, so you don’t need your web developer to help every time you want to make a change to how you track your website’s results.. GTM is particularly useful for handling a large number of tracking codes, as it keeps all of your tags in one place and logs your change history, allowing you to easily track when tags are added or removed from your website.
Setting Up Tag Manager
Like all Google Products, Google Tag Manager requires you to have a Google Account to access.
To log into Google Tag Manager, go to https://tagmanager.google.com and log in with your Google email address, this isn’t necessarily a Gmail account but can just be the username and password that can be used to log into Google’s products.
Once logged in, you can create an account for your website by going to the ‘Accounts’ section in the top left.
Please note – It is important to check if you already have Google Tag Manager on your website before creating a new account. To do this, go to your website, right-click and select ‘view page source’ and use the function CTRL + F to search for “GTM” in your website code. If you have Google Tag Manager installed, you should be able to see something that looks like this
The section highlighted in yellow will be your GTM code, which will always be in the format of GTM-XXXXXX.
If you do have Google Tag Manager on your website but don’t have access to it, speak to your web developers as they most likely implemented it.
Once you have created your Google Tag Manager account, you will be directed to complete the following steps:
- Enter an account name (this will usually be the name of your website)
- Select the country location
- Select ‘Share data anonymously with Google and others’ (this is optional and will enable benchmarking through sharing your data anonymously and combining it with many other anonymous sites)
After creating an account, you will then need to setup a container by going through the following steps:
- Enter a container name (usually your website link)
- Select a container type (this will typically be web if you want to implement tracking for your website)
After this, click create and agree to the terms of service.
The next step will most likely require a web developer to do, as it requires you to add code to your website.
Tags, Triggers and Variables
In Google Tag Manager, there are three main components; tags, triggers and variables. These core components work together to control how your tags work.
Starting from the top level, tags are the snippets of code that get deployed on your website through Google Tag Manager. They are created and defined by the triggers and variables assigned to them. Tags can be set up for various reasons, including tracking conversions, gathering analytics data, or setting up marketing campaigns on different platforms, such as Facebook.
Triggers define the conditions needed for the tags to fire, determining when and where the tags are activated. They work by identifying when specific events on your website occur and then signalling for a tag to be fired. Examples of triggers include page view events, form submissions, or when someone clicks on a button or link on your website.
Variables act as placeholders to store the values used by tags, triggers, and other variables. They help create dynamic tag configurations, which are useful for tracking additional data. There are two main types of variables within Google Tag Manager: Built-in Variables, which are predefined within Google Tag Manager, and User-Defined Variables, which are created by you.
Best practices
To get the most out of your Google Tag Manager account, follow these guidelines to keep your account structured and organised.
Label tags
We recommend clearly labelling your tags and triggers to help keep them organised. For labelling tags, make sure to name the type of tag and where it is tracking, such as Google Ads or Google Analytics.
For a contact form submission conversion in Google Ads, you could use the following example:
GAC (Google Ads Conversion) – Contact Form Submission
Pause old tags instead of deleting them
Pausing old tags can be a good way to keep old configurations that may be used again. For example, if you change your method of conversion tracking, it is worthwhile to pause your previous tag, making it easier to revert to previous conversion tracking.
Preview mode
When making changes in Google Tag Manager, it is important to check that everything works. A simple way of doing this is to use the preview mode. This tool allows you to input your website url and then opens a debugged version of your website, along with showing you a breakdown of everything that gets fired on your website.
By checking your own tracking, it is quicker to identify issues and make changes, rather than having to recreate previously configured tags.
Version Descriptions
Every time you publish a change in Google Tag Manager, remember to briefly summarise what changes have been made in the version. This will make it easier if something breaks, as you will be able to see what may have caused the issue.
Cleanup
To stop your Google Tag Manager from becoming too busy and cluttered, it’s good to schedule some time to clear out any old tags that are no longer needed in your account. We would recommend doing this every 6 months to a year, depending on how often you make changes in your account.
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