Google Tag Manager is an amazing marketing tool that SME owners can benefit from.
In a nutshell, it’s a way to make it easier for you to collect data through your site for marketing purposes.
If you don’t know how data collection is related to tags or how Google Tag Manager does this, don’t worry.
Today’s article is specifically about showing you the answers to those questions.
By the end of this, you should have a better idea of how and why to use Google Tag Manager for your business.
First Off: What Are Tags?
It only makes sense to start here.
Tags are basically bits of code that you can put on a website. These bits of code are meant to track or monitor important information for your business or marketers.
For example, you could have a tag that tracks how people end up on your site.
Or you could have a tag that tracks how long visitors to your site spend on a particular page.
You could even have a tag that tracks which products they remove from their shopping cart in an e-commerce site!
That’s a lot of useful data if you’re a business owner or marketer.
For example, knowing how long visitors spend on a particular page can indicate whether or not you need to improve it and which pages perform better in that sense on your website.
Or knowing which products they remove from their carts helps you figure out both reasons and solutions for shopping cart abandonment, which is among the biggest problems for e-retailers.
In sum, tags grab data that tells you how people are interacting with your website, which can give you serious insight into what to improve in conversion funnels, site design, and more.
The Challenge with Tags
Right, so now you’re probably thinking that tags sound great. And they are!
But we actually mentioned the problem earlier: tags are bits of code.
And as we all know, most business owners and marketers aren’t great with code. That’s something they usually leave to developers.
But even for developers, adding tags manually can be a time-consuming process.
To see why, just think of all the marketing metrics or data you might realise you need at any given moment. Each of those will require a unique tag to be inserted into your site’s code.
If your developer is already busy doing other things (which is very likely), this can lead to a fair bit of time before each tag is added to your site.
It’s especially troublesome for SMEs. These usually don’t have a tonne of resources for technical support and many even have to start out with only one developer.
That’s where Google Tag Manager enters the picture.
What’s Google Tag Manager?
First, Google Tag Manager makes data collection easier, as we said at the start of this article.
If business owners or marketers can implement tags themselves, that means less work for developers.
Owners and marketers get stronger control of their marketing and analytics because it frees them from over-reliance on developers and their timeframes in this area.
And because the tags are both generated and coded into the site automatically, the chances of human error are much lower.
The Google Tag Manager can even help sites load more efficiently by managing the way tags load, preventing them from firing synchronously.
The Caveats to Google Tag Manager
That said, there are still things to be mindful of when using this utility.
The first thing to note here is that it doesn’t free you completely from manual coding in certain situations.
This is most obvious in the fact that to use Google Tag Manager, you have to add a “container code” to your site first, so you may need to tap your developer to do that!
Of course, there are exceptions: some WordPress plugins can do that for you. But similar tools may not be available on other platforms.
Then you have to consider what tags are already on your site (prior to using Google Tag Manager, that is).
Those tags were likely added manually, which means you’ll have to remove them manually too if you want to avoid duplicates when creating new ones via Google Tag Manager.
A Final Word on Google Tag Manager
It’s pretty clear from this that we’re big fans of Google Tag Manager. We love the way it makes gathering data and analytics simpler than ever.
That said, it’s still possible that it’s not for everyone.
If you barely use tags or have a different tagging system in place, for instance, it may be superfluous.
Fortunately, Google Tag Manager is free. That means you’re perfectly at liberty to try it at no cost to you before you make up your mind.
We’d certainly recommend that, even if you’re new to grabbing data for marketing insights!
We’ve talked a lot in other articles about why data is so important, so anything that makes gathering it easier is potentially useful.
If you want to learn more about tags or how to use Google Tag Manager for your business, feel free to get in touch with us!
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