What is Google Tag Manager

Many people confuse that Google Tag Manager is the same thing as Google Analytics. That is NOT TRUE! Google Tag Manager is a tag management tool that you can use to manage your tags. GA is just one of the tags you can have it managed. With it you don’t need to touch your website directly if you want to add, delete and update your tags. On top that, you not only just use it to turn on and off tags on your site, its trigger rules will help you to track things that you normally not easy to do it without developer’s help. This article I will go through some use cases of how advanced marketers use it to better track and optimize their site.

Before that, you should first check out this youtube video to get started:

A little bit tech here

Google Tag Manager consists of these three main parts:

• Tag: A snippet of javascript code added to a page like Google analytics tag, AdWords Conversion Tracking and Remarketing, DoubleClick Floodlight and etc.
• Triggers: Defines when and where tags are executed. That is the magic part as you can use it to track things that you normally cannot be done thru GA alone. I will talk about it more below.
• Variables: Used to receive or store information to be used by tags and triggers.

Use Cases

Use Case 1: User ID Tracking

• This article shows you how to have your site set up and track user id on GA thru Google Tag Manager. According to GA policy, we cannot track identifiable data for user but we can use a chrome plugin named PII-Viewer to get around.
• If you want to track the user next time he or she come back even without login, you can piggyback user id with cookie. To do it, you can check this article

Use Case 2: How to track internal site search

• It is not an issue if your site search query string is part of the query parameter. All you need is to specify the query parameter key (eg. s) in GA. However, what if query string is a part of the url like www.abc.com/search/[show name]. You can follow this article to write a custom javascript to handle it in GTM before passing it to GA.

Use Case 3: Output structural data in JSON-LD format for SEO and Semantic analytics

• Google structural data testing tool

Reference

• http://www.lunametrics.com/
• http://www.simoahava.com/