Digital marketing is filled with data. Every campaign you run, every visit to your website, every social media interaction is tracked and available for analysis. And there are lots of tools available to help you track all of that data. But for all the tools in your arsenal, there’s a very important one that you may have overlooked: Google Tag Manager. What is Google Tag Manager? And, more importantly, why should you use it in your digital marketing campaigns? In this post, I’m going to introduce you to Google Tag Manager and, hopefully, convince you that this is one of the tools you absolutely must have in your digital marketing toolbox.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a free tag management tool available from Google that works hand-in-glove with Google Analytics. You likely know Google Analytics — the free web analytics tool that gives you lots of data and insights about visitors to your website. Well, Google Tag Manager is like rocket fuel for Google Analytics! Google Tag Manager makes it possible to track additional data that you don’t normally get in a regular installation of Google Analytics. And all that additional data can lead to some seriously incredible insights about your marketing campaigns that can take your business to the next level.

Is Google Tag Manager a Good Fit for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses?

In a word: yes! Every business, from the smallest of shops to the largest corporations need to collect data on their marketing campaigns. And Google Tag Manager can make that happen. Consider this: does your company use Google Ads? How about LinkedIn’s company page or advertising platform? Facebook? Twitter? If so, each of these platforms has a tag that must be installed on your website in order to function. Google Tag Manager is the ideal tool to set up those tags on your site and deliver the powerful information you need to market your business.

What Can Google Tag Manager do for Your Business?

Google Tag Manager is powerful and the opportunities to use it for data collection are only limited by your imagination. But I want to show you three quick wins you get when you set up Google Tag Manager on your website:

1. Track visitor engagement with videos on your website. Do you have videos on your website or embedded in your campaign landing pages? If so, wouldn’t it be great to know if anyone ever actually watches those videos? And for those that do watch, how much of the video do they watch? Where do they stop? Do they make it to the end? By setting up event tracking in Google Tag Manager, you can collect data to answer those questions and more. Google Tag Manager pushes all that data into Google Analytics where you can do further analysis to understand the role your videos play in convincing a website visitor to purchase from you or fill out your lead generation form. 

2. Track conversions from Google Ads campaigns. If you are running paid search ads using Google Ads, I hope you are already tracking conversions (if not, let’s talk right away!). Conversions are the meaningful actions visitors take on your website such as the purchase of a product or filling out a form. To make Google Ads conversion tracking work, you must put a unique conversion tracking code into your website. This code will report back to Google Ads when a visitor completes a conversion and that’s what helps you determine if your paid search ads are working for your business. You can put this tracking code into your site manually, but that can be time consuming and lead to errors if you’re not careful. An alternative: push the conversion tracking code to your site using Google Tag Manager. Once it is in place, you’ll begin seeing conversion data in Google Ads and you can use that data to tweak your paid search ads to get the best performance possible.

3. Expand your audience with Facebook. If you use Facebook to market your business, you have access to a powerful tool called Facebook Pixel. This pixel is a small code that can identify those visiting your website and let you add them to unique “audiences” in Facebook. Facebook audiences are a key part of Facebook ad campaigns. Audiences are the people you show your ads to and the more detailed and narrow your audiences are, the better the chance for success with your advertising campaigns. Again, good data is the key here and pushing the Facebook Pixel out via Google Tag Manager is what makes that happen.

There is so much more that Google Tag Manager can do for your marketing campaigns, but these three items are a great way to get started. Once Google Tag Manager is in place, you open your business to a world of marketing possibilities that can transform your digital marketing and move your business forward on the path to success.

Ready to Get Started?

What about you? Are you getting all the marketing data you need from your website? If not, contact us and let’s talk about how Google Tag Manager can boost your marketing efforts and transform your business today!