asingh@fzautomotive.com
August 16, 2022 Analytics and Tracking 0 Comment

If you’ve heard about a tool called Google Tag Manager (GTM), you may be wondering what it does and whether you should be using it on your website. Here, we’ll take a look at this free tool: what it is, how it works, and five ways that you can utilize it to enhance your website and digital marketing.

What is Google Tag Manager & How Does it Work?

First, let’s cover what Google Tag Manager is and why you should use it. GTM is free software developed by Google that allows you to deploy various tags across your website. These tags can initiate triggers that track various user actions or events.

Maybe you’re more familiar with Google Analytics (GA), another powerful tool. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager can exist on your site without one another, yet together, they can enhance your reporting and insights. In other words, GTM does not replace GA, but it can help easily deploy tags and events while providing additional data on visitor behavior.

Instead of needing to hard-code Google Analytics tracking codes, usually by a web developer on each page, Google Tag Manager lets you store all of your tags in one place: your GTM account.

What You Can Track with Google Tag Manager

  • Events: The ability to track events is a key benefit of using Google Tag Manager. By setting up triggers to track events like PDF downloads, link clicks or adding or removing items from a shopping cart, you can get a better idea of user behavior than merely tracking pageviews via Google Analytics.
  • Bounces & Exit Clicks: While Google Analytics can tell you when a user bounces or leaves your site and from which page, it may not tell you how. By using the power of triggers in Tag Manager, you can track whether a user bounces by hitting the back button, closing the browser tab or by clicking an off-site link.
  • Form Abandonment: Sometimes, users may start to fill out a form on your website, such as a credit application or contact us form, before deciding to leave the form incomplete and unsubmitted. By setting up triggers in GTM to catch these actions, you’ll gain insight into how many visitors abandon your forms. This data could help in improving your forms to increase conversions!
  • Scroll Tracking: The scroll depth trigger fires tags based on how far a user scrolls down a web page. You can locate this trigger in the Google Tag Manager user interface by navigating to Triggers, then clicking the NEW button and selecting the Scroll Depth trigger. This is especially helpful when testing website UI and UX and can help with optimizing your website design for conversions.
  • Video Views: When videos are embedded in a web page, Google Analytics alone won’t tell you if a visitor viewed the video, only that they visited the page. The play button on a video can be tracked by a GTM trigger, alerting you to views you otherwise could be unaware of. This is especially helpful for tracking engagement of website visitors higher in the funnel, still in the research phase of their buying journey.

We hope that this introduction to Google Tag Manager and its features and functions has helped you realize the potential of this powerful tool and what it can do for your website and digital marketing initiatives. If you’d like more information on GTM and how you can deploy these tags on your website, reach out to the professionals at fusionZONE Automotive at (424) 232-0728 or contact us online.