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Google Tag Manager for business: 6 common questions about GTM

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Since you have arrived at this blogpost; chances are that you are a website owner, or someone interested in web development. This tutorial is aimed at businesses considering using Google Tag Manager to help with their marketing needs.

Let us begin this article by clearing the basics. This contains answers to some of the common questions businesses have about using the Google Tag Manager. Since Google Tag Manager and Google analytics are closely related, this FAQ also answers some basic questions about Google Analytics.

This tutorial is divided into many sections:

  1. What is Google Tag Manager?
  2. What can I use Google Tag Manager for?
  3. What is Google Analytics?
  4. Who can install Google Analytics on my website?
  5. Do I need to set up both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager on my website?
  6. What kinds of businesses need to install the Google Tag Manager on their website?

1. What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a free tag management system developed by Google that can be used by marketers to easily edit and manage all tags on a website. It needs to be installed by the development team on every page of the website that you want to track. Installing the Google Tag Manager usually involves installing two JavaScript snippets in the HTML of the webpage.

Additional resources:


2. What can I use Google Tag Manager for?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) can track various user interactions on your website and send the data to third party tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads etc.

Some examples of the interactions (but not limited to) GTM an capture are 

  • Button Click events
  • Form downloads
  • Video player interactions (how many times has a YouTube video on your website been viewed?)
Additional resource:

3. What is Google Analytics? 

It is a free tool developed by Google for businesses. It is free for small to mid-sized businesses. Google Analytics is a web analytics service that can be used to collect and monitor traffic data to a website. Monitoring traffic helps us to acquire insights that can give us important information that can be used for marketing purposes. 

Google Analytics is a JavaScript tag that is inserted on every page of the website we want to track. When a user visits the page of a website containing this Google Analytics tag, this tag runs in the background (in the web browser)and collects data. This data is processed by Google and shown in easy to understand reports and graphs through the Google Analytics dashboard. 

Additional recourses:


4. Who can install Google Analytics on my website?

Your development team is usually the one that can help you out on this one. They will install a JavaScript snippet on every page of your website that you need to track.


5. Do I need to set up both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager on my website?

No. You do not need both. You can have your developer set up Google Tag Manager on your website and then you can implement Google Analytics through the Google Tag Manager dashboard. The advantage of this approach is that you do not need to rely a developer to set up and manage the Google Analytics tag in the GTM dashboard. A marketer can set up and manage this and many other marketing tags on the GTM dashboard. As your business grows, you may eventually want to start using other online platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads etc to grow. When this happens, you can again use Google Analytics to track your data to see how successful your campaigns are. To do this, you will have to add tracking code from the social media platform to your HTML code. This means your web pages run the risk of becoming bulky and slowing down. But with Google Tag Manager you eliminate this risk. You can just add the custom tracking codes provided by these social media platforms to the Google Tag Manager. 


6. What kinds of businesses need to install the Google Tag Manager on their website?

Any business that has does transactions online, needs the Google Tag Manager. GTM is very important for anyone who is involved in e-commerce, runs an online store, sells or buys goods online. If you use social media for marketing, you need to have the Google Tag Manager installed on your website. The GTM dashboard will provide an easy way to manage all your pixels in one place. 

In today's economy, many businesses do most of their marketing online. Because of this GTM has become an indispensable tool for them. In my recommendation, all businesses need to have the Google Tag Manager installed on their websites. 


About the Author

Anandi Merchant has been working with businesses to improve their web presence since 2015. She holds a Master of Science (MS) in Electrical Engineering from SUNY, Binghamton. Her Expertise include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Analytics. 

If you need help installing Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager on your website or improving your web presence, you can contact us.
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