Why Google Tag Manager helps Digital Marketing

Ensuring the success of your campaigns does not solely depend on what has been set up before launching. Are you spending too little on campaigns that bring great results? Or are you spending too much on campaigns with no conversion? The only way to know whether you are on the right track is to analyse your campaigns. This is where tracking comes in place.

There are many tools available for tracking. In ChamRun Digital, we mainly use Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM is a free tag management system which allows you to deploy and manage your marketing tags without having to modify the code on your website or landing pages.

Here are the reasons we believe GTM is the best tool for your marketing campaigns.

1. Easy to install

Conventionally, in order to implement tracking, you need to ask the web developers to paste a few snippets of code every time you want to track certain events and later test them which could be time consuming especially if you are a digital marketing agency working with third-party developers. With GTM, you can skip this 1-3 weeks process to 1-3 hours where the developer is required to only paste one installation code inside the website. From there onwards, you will deploy all marketing tags and verify them through the GTM interface.

Figure 1 shows example of GTM installation code which needs to be placed inside your website before you can deploy and manage your marketing tags inside GTM

2. Preview Mode for testing and verification

GTM Preview mode makes it easier for marketers to test and verify their marketing tags before publishing it to the live site. If there are tags which are supposed to fire but not fired in this preview mode, you can easily check that particular tag and make necessary changes.

Figure 2 shows the first interface of GTM Preview mode
Figure 3 shows GTM Preview mode that indicates which tags are fired based on users’ behaviour on the website or landing pages

3. Tags are controlled in one place

Previously, developers needed to locate each snippet of code inside the website source code to make adjustments to the tags. With GTM, everything can be controlled in one place without modifying the website source code which would significantly reduce human errors and data inaccuracy.

GTM workspace comprises three main elements namely Tags, Triggers and Variables.

Tags : Tags are code snippets used to send information to perform specific actions or events in your website (Eg : Scroll Tracking, Form Submission Tracking)

Triggers : Triggers determine when your tags should be fired

Variables : Variables are values in GTM used to operate Triggers and Tags

4. Built-in Event Tracking

In general, event tracking would require custom JavaScript codes to be added to your website. GTM comes with a feature called auto-event tracking such as : 

Conclusion

In our opinion, GTM is a comprehensive tool to manage your marketing tags in one place. By observing the data from your campaigns, you are able to assess your marketing plans and make the necessary enhancement. More importantly, tracking can provide you insights whether you need to stick to your existing campaigns with minor adjustments or start fresh with new campaigns and strategies.