Google Tag Manager is a Big, Fat, Free Present for Marketers - Here's Why

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Published by Fran Jakubowicz on January 17, 2018

Tags

Way back in December of 2012 Google gave Digital Marketers a big, fat, free present in the form of Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Agencies rely on lots of third party tools to track marketing efforts, from Google Analytics to Facebook Pixels and beyond. If you’re code adverse like many marketers you rely on your developer to handle these requests which end up bottle-necked by more urgent priorities the developer has on his or her plate.

Enter Google Tag Manager. Designed to host Javascript code used to track your marketing data from all your favorite third party tools, GTM is very simple to use, even for non-coders. Surprisingly, only a minority of companies (including digital marketing agencies) take advantage of this awesome tool.

GTM has built in tag integrations with a host of third party sites but you also have the ability to create a custom tag if the tool you need to integrate is not listed. For example we use GTM for:

Facebook Pixels
HeatMap and Session Recording Tools
Call Tracking Tools
Live Chat
Surveys
Affiliate Code
You get the picture

Why You Need to Start Using Google Tag Manager Now

1. GTM completely minimizes the need to edit website code. Creating a tag requires no programming knowledge and it’s super easy to set up (think cut and paste). As well, this now means that all code can be managed from one place.

2. With GTM you no longer need to maintain each of these code snippets in your source files. Instead, you specify the tags that you want to fire, giving you much more control over how and when tags fire or don’t fire. And again, You can add, remove, enable or disable any tag on your site without the need of your developer.

According to Google Support:

“All tag firing in Tag Manager is event-driven. Anytime an event is registered by Tag Manager, triggers from the container are evaluated and tags are fired accordingly. No tag can be fired unless an event occurs. An event can be a pageview, a click on a button, a form submission, or any custom event that you define”.

3. GTM can also improve site speed. If your site is overloaded with code your site loads more slowly, simply stated – and this might impact your site showing up in the SERPs. According to Peep Laja from conversionxl :