Google Analytics provides all the tracking that you need on your website. However, there is certain information like, links/button clicked by individuals, how long they have seen any video, who have submitted the form cannot be tracked by Google Analytics. To track this data you need to hire developers knowing JavaScript. This is where you need Google Tag Manager as it manages Google Analytics and also enables the tracking codes through it.
Goggle Tag Manager is an advanced deployment of Google Analytics on any website. The best part of Goggle Tag Manager (GTM) is that it enables marketers to implement tracking codes without accessing the source code of any website or apps.
What else you want? Do you want to do constant changes in websites code?
No. Then implement Google Tag Manager and manage all your website tags on your own without editing code.
Before understanding why we should use Google Tag Manager, let’s first understand what Containers and Triggers are
Containers
The containers are associated with Tag Manager account which stores all the rules, macros and tags for your website. After creating the container, you will receive your container code which will be added to the source code for displaying all the pages of your website. Website structure decides the number of containers. Google Tag Manager implementation grows over time so you should know how to organize containers.
Triggers
Triggers in Google Tag Manager are a way to fire the tag you set up. Triggers listen to your web page or mobile app for certain types of events and tell Tag Manager when to do what you want it to do.
Here are the top 10 Reasons why you should use Google Tag Manager, right now
#1. Event tracking
In order to track events, you need to add code to a website to track visitor events like clicks, form submissions, etc. With Google Tag Manager’s auto-event tracking feature, you need not add a tag to the links which you want to track but enable certain trigger in GTM which will start automatically listening to particular website interactions. Later you can use those interactions to fire tracking codes, e.g. Google Analytics Event Tag.
Basic events that can be tracked in GTM are based on:
- Clicks
- Link clicks
- Form submissions
- Video views
- PDF downloads
- Add to cart click
- Remove from cart click
- Time spent on a page, etc.
#2. Ease of Use
Managing tags through Google Tag Manager is easy since all of the code is stored in one place. Team members updates and create tags quickly without changing complex code on the site. This motivates the team to test each and every change and deploy them faster once it is ready to launch. The advantage with Google Tag Manager is first time only you need to embed code on your website pages later whenever you want to create a tag, Google Tag Manager codes it and embeds it for you.
#3. Version Control
Managing different versions is a challenging task for marketers. Google Tag Manager always creates a new version every time when you publish a change to a container. Thus with GTM, it’s easy to revert back to the older version at any point of time. Google Tag Manager keeps your tags well organized, makes troubleshooting simple and allows you to easily implement similar installations on the new machine.
#4. Schema Implementation
Google Tag Manager helps to inject the schema directly through an HTML Tag. This is a very effective way to get your much-needed schema on the pages. After implementing on one page, you can roll out schema on multiple pages. This is a huge time saver.
#5. Metadata Injection
Using the same HTML tag which is used for schema injection in #4 above, you can also inject metadata directly on to a page. Addition of metadata is important to make your site SEO friendly. Elements which can be included as meta element are:
- Page Title
- Meta Description
- Canonical Links
- Rel Prev/Next Elements
- Noindex tags
- Open Graph Markup
- Twitter Card Markup
Google Tag Manager provides flexibility to edit these elements and thus gives you incredible control over a website’s organic presence.
#6. Preview and Debug Feature
Testing and troubleshooting any tag error is simplified via Google Tag Manager’s Preview and Debug Feature. This shows which tags are fired on a page and which are not. It also provides information about the triggers that fire tags and data contained within tracking tags.
Thus Google Tag Manager’s debugging solutions ensure that your tags work properly before you publish to the live site.
#7. User and Permissions Management
Google Tag Manager easily permits account access to multiple users with different privileges. This feature of GTM provides convenience for agencies as they can give access to multiple employees and also provide access to their clients while ensuring only certain individuals has complete control.
Different permission levels which can be provided are:
- No Access
- Read
- Edit
- Publish
- Approve
- Publish
#8. Built-in Tags
Google Tag Manager comes with a number of important built-in tags for classic and Universal Analytics, AdWords conversions, remarketing, etc. This permits your marketing team to customize tags without implementing complicated code or seeking developer‘s help.
#9. Easy updates and future-proofed Websites
Adding Analytics and conversion tracking to your website is a normal process along with Google Tag Manager. But when upgrading to Universal Analytics is required, it becomes a painful activity if you have to do a lot of code swapping, page modifications, etc.
With Google Tag Manager you can easily switch to Universal Analytics with the same amount of effort but it will make future upgrades and enhancements much simpler since modifications can be made through the interface and not through each page of your website.
#10.Security Feature
Though Google scans all tracking scripts which are added with custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager accounts and pauses when it matches to a known malware domain, IP address or URL. In addition to that, you can control the access to your Google Tag Manager accounts and revoke access at any time.
Conclusion
In my opinion, Google Tag Manager has terrific benefits and gives you some superpowers, but you can’t be a Google Tag Manager expert overnight. Use the above test cases of Google Tag Manager for SEO as it can be very useful for optimizing your page to rank higher on SERPs.
If you are looking to hire professional SEO services to improve your web page ranking then contact Xenia Consulting in Pune or leave your comments below.
Google Tag Manager is easy to use solution to control tracking codes in one place.