Get started with Google Tag Manager

Data is what feeds digital marketing. Understanding how visitors interact with your website plays a key role in strategic decision-making, and “tags” help you do just that. Tags are snippets of code that you add to your website in order to track and collect information about your visitors, and that you can use for various purposes, such as retargeting. In order to modify, add and remove tags, you therefore need to access your source code and do so manually. That’s when Google Tag Manager comes into play: thanks to a user-friendly web interface, you’re able to modify tags at any given time without accessing your source code.

What this means is that marketers no longer rely on developers to dive deep into source code and add, remove, and modify snippets in order to gather the information they require. Even with limited understanding, you can easily make changes on your own. Using Google Tag Manager also streamlines your tags and allows them to start asynchronously, so that your website’s loading time is not extended.

Here are the key concepts you need to know about to get started with GTM.

1. Containers: containers “contain” the tags for your site. You will be able to add, edit, and remove them here.
2. Triggers: these are responsible for firing up your tags. Every tag needs a trigger, otherwise it will just remain inactive and never provide any insight.
3. Variables: these are used to determine when the triggers should activate. A variable contains the value that a trigger needs to determine when it should launch a tag. The required variable value should be specified in the trigger, and when the variable reaches that value, the tag associated with the trigger collects information and stores it for your analytics.

Speaking of analytics, GTM is most-effective when integrated to Google Analytics, but more on that in another post. In the meantime, let us know if we can provide any help setting you up with Google Tag Manager.