Module 7 - Tracking with Google Tag Manager

What is Google Tag Manager and why use it?

Google Tag Manager allows you to use and manage your marketing tags, which are essentially snippets of code on your website. The reason we love using Google Tag Manager so much is because it allows us to accurately track conversion events from Google Ads and also user behaviour on site.

So you are now at the stage of tracking with Google Tag Manager. I just wanted to give you a bit of an overview today. You are going to be diving into it more in this module, but I wanted to go through a few things with you first. One note before we start: I created this as an example account, so it is not our actual account.

What are tags in Google Tag Manager?

Tags tell Google Tag Manager what to do. In this instance we would be wanting to set up a tag for Google Ads conversion events, and that is what we will be tracking. As you can see there, that is the tag you would want to choose. I won't set anything up today.

What are triggers, and when should they fire?

A trigger essentially tells Google Tag Manager when to do it. So you could set up a tag for a conversion event, and then the trigger on that could be a page view.

We would advise, though, that if you are doing a page view you do it for someone who has been on the page for more than 30 seconds. That way it does not track someone who has gone on the page and clicked straight off, because obviously we don't want those people.

You could also set a trigger for a button click. We have done this with a client recently, tracking different button clicks. Someone might have clicked on a button higher up the page, something like buy now or book now, and then later in the page there could be a similar call to action button. We want to track these separately so that we know which one is better performing on that page.

What are variables for?

Variables are basically giving additional information to Google Tag Manager that you might want to track. That is just an overview of Google Tag Manager and why we use it to track conversion events.