Today I want to talk about why you should use Google Tag Manager. If you’re not familiar with Google Tag Manager, in the simplest terms, it is what it says in the name of the product. It is a tag manager. Tags are segments of code and you could read more about them here. So, we have different tags that need to be applied to a website. Some tags that we could apply: a Facebook tag, a Bing tag, a Google AdWords tag, a Google Analytics tag – all kinds of tags. I could go on and on and on.

If you’re a marketer, it can be kind of a pain in the butt every time you have to add a tag. Here are some obstacles you might encounter when adding tags:

A: You have to figure out where in the website you can add the tag.
B: Determine if you need a plugin (WordPress I’m looking at you) or a different content management system to add the code.
C: Do you need to wait on a developer to get the tag added?
D. Determine if you have to change the coding of the website every time you add a new tag to the website.

One ring to rule them all: Google Tag Manager allows you to add one tag that manages all the other tags, when they fire and where they fire, and it makes it super easy!

There are a couple of other reasons why you might want to use the Google Tag Manager. It allows a lot of security. You can control who has access to it and who doesn’t as well as the ability to let multiple people work on the same product.

Google Tag Manager stays up-to-date with any of the Google products, so you don’t have to worry about things being up-to-date there. It will speed up many processes.

You don’t have a lot of code changes to worry about. If you’re not a programming pro, there are lots of tags that come out of the box from other places besides Google Tag Manager. There are debug options to make sure that it works before it comes in.

There’s version control, so if you launch one and you don’t launch it right, you can always go back. Lots of good stuff.

Sign into the entrance page of tag manager and set up an account (Video reference: 3:04). You could have several different websites in that account, but you just name it as you would like. Go ahead and share. Then you’re going to set up one of the containers in there. So we’ll do my site by way of example. You want to make sure that you are not putting the HTTP or HTTPS. There are several containers to choose from. You can use containers for websites. You can also use them for apps, and an amp version as well.

So we’ll go ahead and select the website container. We’ll create it, accept their terms, and now we have a blank Google Tag Manager.

So this is what I’m talking about, that one piece of code right here that goes into the head and the other that gets added into the body. (Video Reference: 4:07). You don’t always need this body tag, but the head tag helps. Once you have it installed, there’s a nice Chrome extension. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s called Google Tag Assistant. Make sure Google Tag Manager is implemented.

Tags is the main feature here, so you’re eyeing these different tags. Just want to show you here all the different things that already, obviously all the Google products, but just straight HTML can be added.

But all of these products already integrate with Google Tag Manager. So there are lots of them here.

Pull the tag. You can determine when it fires. Tags are handy if you’re trying to set up events on your website. An event could be you trying to determine if people watch videos or if click on buttons or something else. To determine those things it requires code that you have to write so those events fire for Google Analytics.

Google Tag Manager makes it so you don’t have to write that code. You can trigger it on different elements. There are many prebuilt elements in it. There are many triggers on default, but then you can configure triggers as well.

You can go ahead and track all kinds of things; you can track all the different click elements, all the different forms; videos; how much people are scrolling on a page; how much visibility they have on the page, etc. All of these options are pre-built in Google Tag Manager.

I highly recommend Google Tag Manager. It will make your life easier. It will make it easier to integrate between Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter all while giving you control from one place.