Your tags – they’re everywhere! At one time or another, you or your developer have likely placed small bits of code on your website for various marketing activities (think Google Analytics, A/B Testing, Social Media tracking, and Advertising ROI tracking, to name a few). You may know them as code snippets, or tracking pixels, but we’ll follow Google’s lead and call them tags.
By now, you’ve probably also heard of Google Tag Manager (GTM), and while the name sounds promising, you are wondering, “What is it?,” “Will it make my life easier?,” and “Is it worth my time?”
Yes, yes, and yes! Google Tag Manager is totally worth the time and effort to implement it, and I’ll tell you why.
Help Me! Help Me!
With so many eCommerce marketing services available to you, it’s easy to end up with over a dozen tags on your website rather quickly. Running Google Analytics, for example, requires about three tags for standard eCommerce and demographics reporting. Want to run a retargeting campaign, do some A/B testing, or track social media ROI? Add more tags to your website. You get the picture – pretty soon you are up to your neck in tags without even realizing it.
Unorganized tags can slow down your site, and can be painful to track. Worse, if you can’t get a tag added to your website before your latest campaign starts, you may be left with incomplete data and inaccurate reporting.
Here I come to save the Day!
Like a superhero, Google Tag Manager swoops in to scoop everything together. Technically referred to as a “container,” GTM contains all of your tags in one place, plants itself in the forefront of every page, and displays tags based on rules that you’ve created.
Also like a superhero, it does this for free.
You can feel confident, as GTM allows you to preview and test tags before publishing them.
You can have peace of mind knowing that if you need to role back to a previous version or your container, you can do so easily with version control.
You can stay on top of things. At a glance, you can easily see which version of your container is published and which tags it contains.
You can save time and work more autonomously, as GTM allows you to add, edit, and deploy new tags without the need of your developer.
Let’s Get Real
While we’ve established Google Tag Manager as a time saver and headache preventer, it is important to note some of its shortcomings; GTM does not supportevery type of tag, and there will still be instances where you will have to rely upon your developer to add a bit of code to your website. However, our conclusion is still the same: Yes, Google Tag Manager is worth it!
If you are interested in getting started, there is no greater resource on the subject matter than Google itself. You can check out the facts here: Google Tag Manager/FAQ
