Google Tag Manager: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you use tracking codes on your website?

Have you heard of Google Tag Manager?

To discover what Google Tag Manager is and how to use it, I interview Christopher Penn.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Christopher Penn, the VP of Marketing Technology at Shift Communications. His book is titled Marketing Blue Belt and he's also a Google Analytics expert. His brand-new course is the 2016 Marketing Plan Framework: How to Build a Data-Driven Customer Journey. Chris is also co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast.

Christopher will explore Google Tag Manager and the future of analytics.

You'll discover how to set up and use Google Tag Manager.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Google Tag Manager
What is Tag Manager

Christopher says Tag Manager is a digital bucket that makes it easier to manage website tags such as a Facebook or Twitter remarketing tag, a pixel from an ad tracking system or a piece of java script.

He explains that when a website has a lot of pages, or if you use a marketing automation system, such as as Marketo or Pardot to manage multiple websites, things can easily get lost.

He says you put the code for Tag Manager on every page of your site only one time then, instead of modifying the tags of individual pages, you simply put new tags in and out of the bucket. Chris adds that it's a lot more reliable than manually managing tags for each page.

Listen to the show to discover how Tag Manager can speed up your site.

The importance of Tag Manager

In addition to speed, Chris believes reliability is a big reason to use Tag Manager. If you have a lot of different webpages, websites or use marketing automation services that have their own landing pages, forgetting to put tags on all those pages will ruin your analytics, Christopher says. As long as you use the bucket on every page, you're covered.

The flexibility of Google Tag Manager, is really important. It allows you specify that you want some tags on some pages, other tags on all pages and certain conditions to be met for still others. Chris shares an example.

Say you are promoting an event, like Social Media Marketing World, and you want to put a tag on the event page for people who have visited the page, but haven't yet purchased a ticket. If you've haphazardly put tags everywhere, you could lose track of what page your tag needs to be on. With Tag Manager, you can specify it to fire the tag if the url has "smmw16" in it.

Tag Manager is also important for social media marketers who don't have control over website updates.

If you're with a big company and constantly have to go through the IT department to add new tags or if you have a small website and use an outside consultant for website maintenance, it becomes difficult to update tags in a timely manner.

With the bucket on every page, you can add and subtract tags through Tag Manager and no one needs to update the website.

Chris illustrates another benefit of using Tag Manager by sharing the example of someone hard coding a Google Analytics tag into their WordPress theme.

When the theme is updated, their analytics tags go away. Use Tag Manager with Google Tag Manager for WordPress plugin, and WordPress will automatically put the bucket on every page so you can update the theme as much as you want without losing those tags.

Listen to the show to learn about assigning roles within Tag Manager.

How to set up Tag Manager

Chris says if you already have a Google Analytics account, you can go to TagManager.Google.