Wouldn’t it be nice to track visitors to your website that leave and offer them an incentive to come back? Or how powerful would it be to see when your browsers move from their laptop to a mobile device? Well you can, in the capable hands of Google’s Tag Manager. We are going to cover what this software is, how it can help your business, and you’ll see for yourself the myriad of functionalities.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tracking tool that helps marketers, web developers and analysts track data by adding a simple ‘tag’ to their website’s code.
The beauty of GTM is that you don’t have to sift through all of your site’s pages to apply changes to each coding. Who has time to sit around and wait for updates when you want to track which customers spend $20 in cart, and then change it to which customers spend $30? Instead, copying and pasting a device called a ‘container’ which – you guessed it – contains all website tags means you can adjust all the previously set up individual tags from the GTM interface. It’s kind of like setting up an intricately designed spider web inside a living room, but instead of adjusting each and every joined section of webbing to catch a nearby spider, having a remote control to do it all for you, from the safety of outside the room. And without a web developer – or spider catcher, if you will – necessary.
Here’s a video Google produced to introduce this software when it first came out:
You can use tags for many different types of data collection, whether that’s for tracking which visitors convert into customers, to which ones visit but ultimately leave your site, and everything in between. You might use your Google AdWords account and create a tag called ‘AdWords Conversion Tracking’. Create a rule for your tag, so once that rule is activated, a trigger will be fired off and the data will be sent out to you. For instance, once a customer has purchased a product from your store and landed at a specific ‘order completion page’ URL that may display the sentence ‘Thank you for your purchase’, the Adwords conversion tracking trigger will be set off.
Why bother using it?
GTM is the simple approach to tackling a large amount of coding on your site – plus, it loads quicker than doing it manually! It’s much more efficient and timely than waiting on a web developer and you can preview and debug your changes before launching live, reverting back to previous versions if need be.
Eliciting data about users’ behaviour, demographics, interests, browsing session durations, conversion rates on specific elements on the page, location-directed traffic and much, much more means you learn so much more about what is and isn’t working on your site. Setting up a remarketing (or retargeting) tag means you can target those browsers who clicked to view your products, even added them to their cart, but ultimately left your site. Were shipping cost arrangements visible on all parts of the website? Was the visitor required to register and subsequently fill out another form to complete the transaction? Can you target their viewed items to appear as Facebook ads once they leave your site? By building an audience list, collecting cookies from a certain group that perhaps hasn’t visited your site in the past month and target them with a discount code. Or, you could reward all users who purchase a certain product type or sign up for a specific conversion goal. If the tracking code is enabled on your site and it matches certain criteria that you’ve specified, like we’ve suggested above, then that data will be accessible in AdWords. Use this information garnered from cookies to learn what deters your customer from purchasing your product or service.
Setting up Google’s Universal Analytics in Tag Manager allows tracking of the user journey between devices, which is pretty nifty for those who want to see what may deter a browser from completing their purchase on a mobile device, or a laptop, or tablet. Google Tag Manager doesn’t discriminate either, so you can set up non-Google related tracking tags, such as through ComScore, which offers plenty of audience insight, too. All of these data are useful, but can be equally overwhelming if an action plan isn’t set in place. Having a variety of rules and tools to track the incoming data means you can alter your marketing approaches accordingly.
So once you have your data collated, what are you going to look at first? Come and speak with us at Arrow Digital about what we can do for you and the prosperity of your site!
