TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Embedding a GTM tag on your microsite
- Using GTM to add and fire tags
- Note for existing GA users
Introduction
Digital Marketing serves as a powerful tool to generate leads and get more traffic onto one’s website. Since there are multiple channels, social media and advertising tools available in the market today, it becomes imperative to understand where one’s digital audience comes from and thus specially target those users to ensure the maximum results and ROI out of the marketing budget spent. Thus, tracking metrics related to the leads, conversions and traffic becomes useful to understand the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns and the traction they receive. Managers should thus be able to own and customize these dashboards to serve their own bespoke needs.
Since there are multiple such channels (Facebook pixel, Google Analytics tag, Google Adwords tag, Linkedin pixel, Twitter pixel etc), spending time and effort to individually add these tags to the microsite is nontrivial. Hence, Google Tag Manager serves as a powerful and easy alternative. It is a free tool that allows marketers to implement and make tracking changes to a website without needing to hire a web developer. All programs can then be deployed through that one GTM code and managed behind the scenes on a simple dashboard. As the needs of your website change, new programs and program updates can be made through the Google Tag Manager dashboard, without ever having to dive into the code on the web pages themselves.
Publisher platform now allows you to embed your Google Tag Manager code onto the profile section, which will be elaborated in depth in the below sections. This capability will replace the Google Analytics feature which has been deprecated. Existing GA users can still see their tag in their profile and would continue to be able to track data on their GA dashboard. New users would be able to accomplish this use case via Google Tag Manager itself.
Embedding a GTM tag on your microsite
The following steps must be followed in order to embed a Google Tag Manager code onto your microsite:
- Create an account in Google Tag Manager once you have logged in with your google credentials:
The link to your microsite with ‘Web’ selected must be entered in the below screen
- Once Google’s terms of service are accepted, a popup will appear with the code to be embedded such as below
- Please keep note only of the container id of the format GTM-XXXXXXX (in this case, GTM-KRS3844). This would be required to be embedded on the publisher profile.
This container id can also be found in the header of the account page.
1. Post this, navigating to the Publisher profile section on the publisher platform, you will find a field called ‘Google Tag Manager Snippet’ under the ‘Website’ section.
2. The code obtained earlier can be paste here and saved
3. Post saving changes, it would take upto 24 hours for the snippet to be embedded on the microsite successfully, post which the user can start adding codes from the Google Tag Manager console.
Using GTM to add and fire tags
- Login to your GTM dashboard
- A new tag can be added by clicking on the ‘New tag’ CTA
- Two options will be presented:
The first for adding a tag will result in multiple tags being visible, that can be embedded.
b. Clicking on the tag configuration button will display a host of tag types that can be added, including a custom one.
- A measurement id or tracking id must also be created from the Tag dashboard before embedding it via GTM.
For example, if a Google ads tag is to be generated a new Google Ads tag must be generated from the Google Ads dashboard (either through a pre-existing or a new account).
These details must be filled while creating this new tag. Several parameters will be present for finer tuning and cases, but these fields will be explained by means of tooltips in specific cases.
iii. Once these details have been filled a trigger must be chosen to fire this tag.
By default, three triggers are present which should solve almost all use cases. Custom ones can be added for bespoke use cases.
iv. Once confirmed, these changes will be saved and would be ready to publish.
v. Post confirmation of the same, the new version with the changes would be published and the same can be viewed on the microsite.
vi. Additions and management of tags can happen from the GTM dashboard based on requirements and would have to be published in the similar way as described above.
Note for existing GA users
Existing Google analytics users can continue to see their code embedded and their tracking stream working as is. GA users can switch to GTM for a more powerful experience. Users who have not embedded their GA code yet, can continue to embed their GTM tag.
Through GTM, the use-case for GA can be achieved with multiple more tags features which can be added, removed and fired on the fly.