In this section you will learn what Google Tag Manager is and some of the business benefits it will provide to your organization.
Let’s start with a definition of a tag:
A tag is a piece of code that is deployed onto a website or mobile application that allows you to track things like the behaviour or attributes of visitors on your website. You might use tags to track whether a visitor created an order from an online advertising campaign, or you might use tags to track your visitors’ journey through your website and attributes like what browser or operating system they are using.
The great thing about tags is that they help you find out more about the visitors to your website. You can use this data market to them or improve their experience. There are many companies that provide tags (often for free) to support this process. The problem with tags is that you need someone with access to your online servers to deploy them; typically that person is a web developer or an IT administrator.
Google Tag Manager allows you to deploy tags to your website without access to the online servers. We do not recommend that you remove the involvement IT or web developers from the process of deploying tags completely. A good tag strategy should incorporate all of the departments in your organization. Your IT team may be able to help provide you with good processes for testing and implementing tags.
One last comment before we move on, Google Analytics is a tag that can be deployed with Google Tag Manager. This gives you the option to either deploy Google Analytics through the Google Analytics functionality or deploying Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager. You can track page views and ecommerce transactions through Google Tag Manager just like you can through our Google Analytics functionality. The method that you choose is up to you, but do not use both of the methods on your site for the same Google Analytics account. If you do, you will double your page view statistics and ecommerce transactions.
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Information There are two Google Analytics products that can be deployed through Google Tag Manager: Universal Analytics and Classic Google Analytics. Universal Analytics is the operating standard for Google Analytics tracking tags. Classic Google Analytics is an older method that will be depreciated in the future. For the purposes of this guide we will refer to the Google Analytics product as a whole as Google Analytics and reference only deploying Google Analytics using Universal Analytics. |
