If you run digital marketing for a small or medium business, you’ve probably heard about Google Tag Manager at some point. It’s sometimes confused with Google Analytics, which is a separate feature but should be used in conjunction with Google Tag Manager (let’s call it GTM for short). In this article, you’ll discover what GTM is and how it can help you optimise your digital marketing efforts.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager is a fantastic, free tool to improve audience tracking and productivity to gain optimal insights into your marketing campaigns.
While it’s been around since 2012, it’s undergone several updates and improvements and is now used by hundreds of thousands of UK businesses.
It works by simply adding a small piece of GTM code to your website. You can then control all of the different ‘tags’ from the GTM interface. What is a tag, you ask?
These are the individual snippets of code that perform specific functions, such as tracking pageviews, conversions, or user interactions. The most commonly used tags include Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and conversion APIs.
The platform allows you to set triggers that define when a tag should fire, such as when someone views a particular page or clicks a certain button. It can even monitor page scroll depth and time spent on the page.
It also contains a preview mode that allows you to test your tags before they go live in your site. This means you can reduce the risk of tags causing any problems with site performance.
What are the benefits of Google Tag Manager?
Without GTM, any tags (the bits of code that enable tracking on websites) need to be implemented manually into the website’s code. So every time you wanted to change or improve the way you tracked your website visitors, you’d need a web developer to go into each individual page and edit the code.
This is laborious and time-consuming at the best of times. But as you know, web developers are often snowed under with work, so you could be waiting weeks for a simple update.
GTM greatly reduces this reliance on developers, and therefore the time it takes to update your tracking. GTM’s platform means marketers themselves can identify, implement, test and publish improvements to tracking tags in a matter of minutes. With all your marketing and analytics tags in a central location, it’s so much easier to manage.
Once you’ve copied the initial GTM code into your website, you won’t ever need to do any direct coding to add or change your marketing tags. You can simply select them from GTM’s interface. This increased accessibility is fantastic for smaller businesses that might not have access to web developers, and opens up a whole new landscape of opportunities to improve your digital marketing.
What’s more, GTM also improves website speeds by loading tags more efficiently and enables better integration with third-party tools and platforms.
What’s possible when you harness Google Tag Manager?
In essence, GTM acts as an intermediary between your website and various marketing/analytics tools, making it easier to collect and manage data about your site’s performance and user behaviour.
Because it has so many tagging options, you can use it to optimise almost any aspect of your customer journey and increase profitability. Let’s have a look at some examples.
Let’s say we have a business coach who offers 1:1 sessions and online courses via their website. They might use GTM to set up custom events to track user interactions with course previews and free resources. They could also implement e-commerce tracking to monitor the performance of different courses and coaching packages.
This could reveal insights that give the coach ideas to optimise their website. For example, GTM might show that users who watched more than 50% of a course preview video were 3x more likely to purchase. Therefore creating more course previews could increase course sign-ups.
They might discover through enhanced tracking that a certain course had high completion rate but low initial sign-ups. So focused marketing around this course, highlighting the benefits, could increase enrolments.
It also works for businesses that have a physical store but use online marketing and booking.
Let’s say a salon took appointment bookings through their website. Through form submission tracking tags, they might discover that a lot of booking attempts were selected at the service selection stage. They might also set up remarketing tags to identify clients who are due for their next appointment.
Through the insights gained from GTM, they might streamline and simplify the service selection process and reduce booking abandonment. They could also set up automated email campaigns to remind those clients who are due for their next appointment, and increase repeat bookings.
How do you set up Google Tag Manager?
Those couple of examples just scratch the surface of what you can do with GTM. It really is a priceless tool for businesses that use online marketing. And it’s free. Like we said, you don’t need any coding knowledge to start optimising your marketing and customer journeys.
However, it is quite an in-depth platform, and it can be a bit overwhelming for people who aren’t confident using those sorts of online tools. Some companies can afford to employ an in-house digital marketing specialist, but for many SMEs, that isn’t feasible.
That’s where hiring a digital marketing partner can be invaluable. They can use GTM to monitor your marketing performance, identify areas for improvement, and implement changes to optimise it. All for a smaller monthly fee than employing in-house specialists.
That kind of flexible and transparent support is exactly what we offer at Big Voice. So if you want to start optimising your digital marketing but aren’t sure where to start, give us a shout.