Success within digital marketing is driven by data. No matter what type of website you have, from a small business website to a large e-commerce store, it’s essential to understand how users interact with your website.

Although free tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console (Webmaster Tools) can deliver important insights into website data, they do also have their limitations.

Speaking from my own personal experience, I have been in the exact same position as you in struggling to identify certain elements of data and it’s only through research, training and speaking to other digital marketers I have come across the topic of this blog… Google Tag Manager.

Don’t worry, you probably have the same questions I do, what is Google Tag Manager? How can Google Tag Manager help me understand data? Well inside this blog, our Cheshire web design agency will guide you through Google Tag Manager and explain the advantages and disadvantages… so let’s get started!

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a free tag management tool that allows you to quickly create, edit and generate marketing tracking tags (snippets of tracking code) on your website or mobile app, without having to modify or implement the tracking code physically into your website.

One a Tag Manager tracking snippet has been implemented onto your website, you can configure tags, via the Google Tag Manager user interface, eliminating the process of editing or deploying additional tracking code, reducing errors and time management.

What’s the purpose of Google Tag Manager?
Good question. For example, let’s say you have a website with a phone number and want to track how many clicks you get, Google Tag Manager will track when a user clicks/taps on the phone number and product the data in your Google Analytics account.

Google Tag Manager Disadvantages

Technical Knowledge

Although the purpose of Google Tag Manager is to reduce the reliance on coders or developers, it doesn’t eliminate it! First of all, once you have created your snippet of code, you will need the technical knowledge to know where to add it on the website or remove any existing code! For all our Cheshire web design agency customers, no need to worry, we can easily instruct you how to do this.

Furthermore, while GTM has plenty of tag templates to choose from and are easy enough to configure, this only applies to the simplest of tags. For more complex triggers, it requires much more technical knowledge of how the system works and someone who understands coding to unpick any errors. For the purpose of this blog, I have struggled with the technical knowledge so have started free Google Tag Manager training.

Support

Although Google offers a great training video and an easy-to-use interface, it pretty much ends there! If you are struggling with Google Tag Manager, there is no official support so if like me, you run into any issues, you have to research online.

Google Tag Manager Advantages

Website Speed

Historically, any custom or traditional tracking code can fall victim in contributing to slowing your website speed down. Without the correct trigger instructions, if any tracking snippets do not work or are slow to load, will create a queue and cause your website to take longer to load, which will mean users will leave your website or the tracking code will fail to capture the data. All tracking code created in GTM load synchronously by default, meaning each tag can fire anytime it’s ready to, with further options to instruct the order of your codes.

User and Permission Management

Perfect for contributing in teams or level of knowledge, Google Tag Manager allows you to easily set permissions for each user and what modification they have to assist with tag creation and modification.

Troubleshooting

With so many upgrades, overtime users will make modifications to their snippets of codes, which can suddenly stop working. However, with GTA, each time a change is made, the system an archived version is saved. This means if your tracking code suddenly stops working, you can quickly identify the issue and roll it back to the previous working version, eliminating time spent troubleshooting the problem.

Cheshire Web Design: The Verdict

Regardless of being a small business or a large e-commerce store, ALL websites will benefit from Google Tag Manager, but only if you want to analysis the data to make better digital marketing decisions. As a Cheshire web design agency, we would highly recommend the free Google Tag Manager training as your starting point, then engage with our team on putting together the perfect digital marketing plan