Articles in The 'Tracking Pixels' Tag

Google Tag Manager – How to Get Started Now!

by Theo Bennett

Google Tag Manager was announced today at eMetrics in Boston and MoreVisibility is one of a select group of companies that has passed a rigorous screening to be recognized by Google as a Google Tag Manager Specialist. So if you need help planning and executing your deployment, we’re here to help!

In this post we’ll try to answer these questions:

What is Google Tag Manager?
Why deploy Google Tag Manger?
How do I add Google Tag Manager to my site?
What else do I need to do to use Google Tag Manager?

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a free TMS or Tag Management solution. Rather than copying and pasting multiple conversion codes and tracking pixels on your site, or getting IT to add this work to their queue every time you launch or change a marketing effort, with Google Tag Manager you simply place one container tag on every page of your site and that’s it! Now when you need to add conversion coding, you just log into your Google Tag Manger account, add the coding in the interface and your container tag will pull this new conversion code onto the pages you specify.

Why deploy Google Tag Manger?

Google Tag Manager allows Marketers to quickly deploy tags and conversion coding for new initiatives — without IT resources. In addition, the ability to define when your tags fire gives you added flexibility and control! For example, maybe you only want to retarget visitors to your online store that placed more than $100 of merchandise in their cart. Simply set a rule that defines this interaction and now only these high value visitors will be placed in your remarketing audience!

How do I add Google Tag Manager to my site?
This is the easy part.

1. Simply visit the Google Tag Manager website.
2. Sign up for an account
3. Follow the steps to create a container tag
4. Copy and paste it onto your site.

That’s it! You’re now ready to add your tags and publish them to your container.

What else do I need to do to use Google Tag Manager?

Is it really that easy to deploy? Well yes and no. Just like there is more to using Google Analytics than pasting the snippet on your site; certain interactions and data need to be defined to get the most from Google Tag Manager. The most important piece is defining the data layer. What is the data layer? Well I’ll tackle that in another post this week, but suffice to say that the data layer collects information and makes it available to the tags and pixels in Google Tag Manager.

While Google Tag Manager is a powerful and flexible tool that allows marketers to quickly deploy and measure new initiatives; the key to a fully leveraged installation is a proper measurement plan that considers:

• All of the data that is available

• The data that you are collecting today

• The data that you’d like to collect

• The development (if any) required to collect this data

Once your plan and data layer are in place and your container is live and published, you are on your way to rapid reaction and deployment of all your online marketing measurement needs!