Council Post: Five Reasons Your Website Needs Google Tag Manager

By Jon Clark, managing partner at Moving Traffic Media, a New York digital agency offering PPC and SEO services.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is free software from Google that helps businesses with tag management and installation. Before GTM, everything needed to be hardcoded and even adjustments to your tracking usually required developers. But with GTM, even without any developer experience, you can update your website’s code and let the interface basically take care of the rest.

Here are the top five reasons that you should be using Google Tag Manager today. 

Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics work better together. 

With Google Analytics settings guided by GTM, you can really amp up the power of your Google Analytics account and create a seamless experience. 

Let’s say you’ve added a few downloads to your site. To understand how downloads are affecting traffic, it’s crucial to know how many downloads have taken place and what page the users are on when they download your content. Basically, you need to know when, where and why the download occurred. You could use GTM to set up a Google Analytics tag that triggers to find out everything you need to know, without adding a single code snippet to your site. 

GTM also makes it easier to use more complex Google Analytics like User ID tracking so that you can gather a more complete picture of who your users are. 

You love cost-effective solutions.

GTM is free. For larger businesses with more robust needs, Google offers GTM 360, which is GTM with all the bells and whistles, for a fee. 

But let’s focus on the free version. It’s easy to install Google Tag Manager and use it. This gives you more flexibility in the type of staff you employ and helps you save on payroll. Thanks to GTM, you can empower any team member to handle what previously required a dedicated employee.

With your operations streamlined, you can control all your tracking codes from one place. This saves time and makes your business run more efficiently. 

You want fast results.

In business, time is money. 

Before Google introduced GTM in 2012, changing or adding code to your site could take days, if not weeks. It would start with you, the marketer, wanting to install a tracking ID code. You would then find a developer to add, test and fix the code, which of course was done according to their schedule and workload. If you were lucky, you would be up and running within a week, but it would often take longer. 

With a Google Tag Manager account what once took a week or more can be done in hours or less. One GTM case study noted a 600% improvement in tag implementation time.

You want deeper insights.

Google Tag Manager automatically listens to all the activity on your pages when you enable certain triggers. A simple GTM tag can provide in-depth information such as:

• The length of each page view.

• Scroll tracking.

• Event tracking.

• Conversion tracking.

• When and where there were intentions to bounce.

• And more.

You can make your content more engaging and drive conversions with insights such as: 

• Are your visitors commenting about your content on social media? 

• How many times are they presented with a form before filling it out? 

• At what point are they bouncing? 

• What experience is better suited to having them stay longer?

You value security. 

You don’t have time to deal with malware and malicious attacks. In fact, nobody does, but unfortunately, it’s a fact of life for the internet. You can’t miss a single beat when it comes to keeping your site clean and safe. Google Tag Manager makes this easier for you to do. 

GTM will automatically scan every tracking script that’s added with a custom HTML tag and will halt if they align with a recognized malware IP address, domain or URL. 

You can also set up blacklists and whitelists to help you control which tags, triggers and variables are allowed on your page. Should GTM become compromised, you still have the ultimate say in what tracking scripts can be run on your pages. 

Bottom Line

If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that there’s always a way to be more efficient and more successful. Google Tag Manager is a tool that can help you become both of those things. If you’re not using GTM today, it’s time to start.