Introduction to Google Tag Manager

Tags on your website help you measure traffic and optimize your online marketing. But all that code is cumbersome to manage. It often takes too long to get new tags on your site, or update existing ones. This can delay campaigns by weeks or months -- so you miss valuable opportunities, data, and sales. That’s where tag management comes in. Google Tag Manager is a powerful, free tool that puts you, the marketer, back in control of your digital marketing. You update all your tags from Google Tag Manager instead of editing site code. This reduces errors, frees you from having to involve a webmaster, and lets you quickly deploy tags on your site. Here’s how it works. Sign in with an existing Google account. Go to google.com/tagmanager and create an account for your company. We’ll name this one after the name of our company- Example, Inc. Next, create a container for your domain name. We’ll name this one after our website, example.com. This container will hold all the tags on the site. When you create a container, Google Tag Manager generates a container snippet to add to your site. Copy this container snippet. And paste it into every page of your site. Paste the snippet below the opening body tag. Once you’ve pasted the container snippet into your site, you add and edit your tags using Google Tag Manager. You can add any marketing or measurement tag you want -- whenever you want. Let’s add a couple of tags to the container. You can add both Google and non-Google tags. Here, we’ll add an AdWords Conversion Tracking Tag....for our Purchase conversion. To find the conversion id and conversion label values, look at your existing tags or, sign in to Adwords and get them from the conversion tracking interface. We’ll set up a rule so that this tag only fires on the “thank you” page, which is our conversion page. We’ll save our rule. And save the tag. We also want to use Google Analytics on the site, so we’ll add a Google Analytics tag. This tag should fire on all pages. You can add as many tags as you need to a container. You can preview the site with the tags -- making sure the site looks and behaves as you expect. A version, or snapshot, of the container is created when you preview. You can also create versions at any time as you work. When you’re ready, go to the version you want, and publish it. This publishes your tags to the live site. You can publish changes any time -- your web team doesn’t need to be involved. Google Tag Manager is extremely flexible. It provides versioning, user permissions, and many other features. To learn more, go to support.google.com/tagmanager.