As a digital marketing agency, tracking the results from various digital ad channels is part of daily work, but each digital ad channel has its own conversion tracking code to install. If you do not want to trouble the engineer every time you install a tracking code, using a good code management tool can save both parties a lot of time and effort. Among them, the free and powerful GTM (Google Tag Manager) has become a favorite tool for many marketers and engineers!

Have you heard of Google Tag Manager (GTM)? For those of you who run an e-commerce website alone, the most important thing is managing traffic. However, once you have traffic, the next step is how to manage it. Knowing how to manage traffic can not only accurately classify converted events but also convert traffic into sales, creating unlimited value!

What is Google Tag Manager?

Website owners usually have used third-party digital marketing tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other third-party digital marketing tools to track website or ads performance! A string of snippets of Javascript code is provided by these third-party online marketing tools. This string of code can be used for many purposes, the most commonly used is the return message.

When you annotate different marketing activities, the code will send back messages to third-party digital marketing tools, so it can help you analyze and improve consumer clicks and other activities on your e-commerce website. For example, from which channel do consumers enter your e-commerce website, which ad has the highest click-through rate (CTR), which ads actually have the highest conversion rate when placing an order, who to do remarketing, A/B testing, etc. A string of pieces of Javascript code is called a tag.

Why do you need to use Google Tag Manager?

Simplify all unnecessary troubles

In order to analyze various digital marketing campaigns, you are bound to use many tools, and in order to track the performance of each campaign, you have to create a corresponding tag code in each campaign and paste the code back to the corresponding webpage.

For example, if you are running a Google Ads campaign, using both Google Analytics and Google Ads to track conversions and return some kind of behavioral information about consumers on your e-commerce website, the traditional way is that you have to manually add each tag code. However, with Google Tag Manager, you can simplify this series of tedious processes, as long as you mark the code tags you want to use in the management interface of Google Tag Manager so that you can easily set and enter code tags and track results.

Increase website stability and loading speed

Excessive code tags will not only delay the loading speed of the web page, but even cause the server to be overloaded, and the e-commerce website will crash temporarily, which will cause the loss of consumers. According to the Kissmetrics research survey, if you wait more than 3 seconds, you will already lose 40% of your visitors, and waiting for 1-second longer will reduce the viewing rate by 11%, reduce consumer satisfaction by 16%, and lose more. 7% conversion rate! (https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/)

If you use Google Tag Manager, the chances of the above situation will be greatly reduced, and consumers will have a better experience on your e-commerce website.

What does Google Tag Manager consist of?

1. Account

Account is the highest access in Google Tag Manager. An account can be used to manage one or more e-commerce websites. Generally speaking, a company only needs one account to manage all its e-commerce websites. If you are tracking and managing the digital marketing performance of different companies at the same time, you can link all Tag Manager accounts to one Google account.

2. Container

Believe that you are smart and you will quickly guess that the so-called container is the place where the label is placed. There will be at least one container in an account to load code tags and trigger conditions. For example, a container may contain a code tag to record consumer shopping behavior and contains a trigger condition. The code tag will only record this transaction information when the thank you shopping page pops up.

In general, a container corresponds to a domain, and a container can contain multiple code tags and trigger conditions, so there is no need to place code tracking in each page.

3. Code Tag

4. Trigger condition

Trigger conditions are composed of variables, operators, and values. Since the operation mode of the code tag is triggered by the occurrence of a certain event and then starts collecting data, you set the trigger event to tell the code tag when it should be triggered. For example, if you set All Pages as the trigger condition, no matter what page is in the loading state, the code tag will be triggered. There are other situations like the consumer removing the item from the shopping cart, or the user pressing the call to action button to download the EDM or e-book, etc.

- Variable
Variables help define when code tags should return messages, and variables can be subdivided into built-in variables and user-defined variables. The built-in variables are the default values ​​of the system, and there are quite a few commonly used trigger methods

such as page path {{page path}} or click {{click ID}}

You just need to click to activate, and user-defined variables It is a variable that you define especially according to its needs.

For example, when the purchase is completed {{purchaseComplete}} is when the transaction is completed and the price of the product viewed by the user is returned.

- Operator

Define the relationship between variables and values. The system will judge whether the trigger condition is true or false during the execution stage, and the two must correspond to ensure the smooth operation of the trigger condition. The most common operation symbols are equals, contains, or does not contain.

- Value

Well-defined variables can be specific numbers or web page URLs, and the trigger tag is used to collect information.