How to use Tag Management

Are you ready to launch your marketing campaigns? Before you start spending money, remember to be sure you properly track users’ activity and conversions on your website.

Nowadays, many companies use and test different PPC & marketing platforms and for each of them, there are separate tags to be implemented in the source code of the website. The best solution to reduce the workload on the developers’ side and to ensure smooth tag implementation and tracking is to use one of the tag management solutions available on the market.

In this article we will focus on the most common tag management system: Google Tag Manager, but depending on your needs you can also check out other tag management solutions such as TagCommander, Launch by Adobe, or Tealium.

What do I need tags for?

Google Analytics tag, Google Ads basic & conversion tags, Facebook Pixel & conversions tags, floodlight Doubleclick tag… the list could be much longer if you decide to use other advertising platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter, or affiliate partners. It seems like a lot of work. So do you really need all those tags? That’s the first question that may come to mind if the agency sends you a list of all the tags they want to implement to track actions on your website.

If you want to be a leader in your area, you need a data-driven approach. The more accurate the data you gather about your user and your campaign performances, the more insightful the conclusions you can draw out of it. But the good news is that, thanks to tag management solutions, the implementation of those tags is much easier than you think and can be outsourced in major part to the marketing agency you work with.

Why tag management solution?

• You don’t need to implement all of the tags manually.
• You don’t need to bother your developer team each time there is a new tag or update to be implemented.
• You don’t work on pure code but in the user-friendly interface.
• You can easily test if the implementation was successful.

In summary, tag management solution is just a great time & money saver.

Google Tag Manager

What is Google Tag Manager (often referred to as GTM)? As per the definition, it is a tag management system created by Google to manage JavaScript and HTML tags used for tracking and analytics on websites. Using more human language, this is one of the most common market solutions that helps you save your time when implementing and testing different tags on your website without editing code manually.

The good thing about GTM is that some of the tags are already predefined (Google Ads, Google Analytics) – you need just to specify a few parameters to make them work. It is also free and well recognized on the market, so no matter with what marketing agency you work, they should at least be familiar with Google Tag Manager.

Tags & Triggers

So how does it work? The basic mechanism used by Google Tag Manager to handle how tracking codes are configured and fired is based on two concepts: tags and triggers.

Tag: A tag is a piece of code that sends data to systems such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and others. Once the tag is correctly implemented, the data will be gathered and visible in the system’s dashboards.

But how will the system know when to fire a specific tag? You need to configure a trigger – this is the information for the system to recognize when the tag should be fired and a specific conversion or action counted.

Trigger: A trigger listens for certain events on the website, for instance clicks, form submissions, or page loads of specific URLs. When an event is detected that matches the trigger definition, any tags that reference that trigger will fire.

Yes, there are also variables and data layers but don’t worry, your marketing agency will explain it to you or your developer team if needed.

Depending on the complexity of the triggers you want to use for the tracking purposes, the work of creating triggers may be split between your marketing agency and your developer team. For the large majority of the cases though, the marketing agency should be available to create triggers by themselves.

Tagging plan & testing

We recommend creating a tagging plan before starting the tag implementation – it will ensure you are clear on what your agency wants to implement through tag management solution and where it requires an additional input on your side.

This is also a good base for further tag implementation testing. Google Tag Manager has a Preview option that allows you or your agency to easily check if the implemented tags are firing correctly on the triggers you defined. Easy-peasy!

Our verdict: don’t wait any longer! Contact your marketing agency and let them help you as per the tagging plan you both agree on! Once you start gathering the proper data, the next step will be to analyse it and draw the correct conclusions to make sure your campaigns become better and more effective!