Data Management at a Tag Level: Google Tag Manager

Poor Data In = Poor Data Out

Data informs and shapes our marketing campaigns and strategies, providing marketers with the insights required to tailor marketing tactics in order to maximize engagement within audiences and increase return on investment (ROI). However, our analysis of this “data out” is only as good as the quality of our “data in.” Gathering the right data is not always easy. For many marketers, the abundance of data produced by disparate sources has made the task of identifying and unifying relevant insight seem colossal... no matter how sophisticated the technology is, quality insight and results depend on the quality of what is input initially. (Dobson, 2018).

A helpful safeguard for preventing poor data acquisition and therefore poor data out is by leveraging a tool like Google Tag Manager to help clean the data prior to being sent to Google Analytics. When possible, fixing the data at its source or as close to the source is ideal to help improve the data analysis process within Google Analytics. Data quality issues can plague a Google Analytics account, making analysis difficult, time-consuming, or at its worst, leading to incorrect conclusions; there are many ways to affect the data that you collect and use in Google Analytics, and with recent improvements to Google Tag Manager, it’s even easier to have clean, readable data (Matchett, 2018).

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows marketers to manage and deploy marketing tags on a website, without having to physically modify the code in partnership with a developer. These tags might be code snippets or tracking pixels on the website, that work to gather additional data prior to being sent to Google Analytics. Google Tag Manager serves as the conduit between information on your website to Google analytics (Fig. 1).



Fig. 1: Google Tag Manager Overview (Gant, 2017)

A benefit to marketers using Google Tag Manager is that it eliminates tedious code-editing tasks that formerly required a developer. It allows the marketing team to add and update their own website tags – including javascript code snippets for site analytics, conversion tracking, and remarketing – while the development team focuses on larger projects (Ironpaper, 2015). This helps to reduce project overhead, team hours, burn rate, and time-to-market for marketing strategies by removing a round of required dev updates by a web developer when adding tagging such as third-party tags or pixels.

The Importance of Tagging

In addition to offering insight into the impact of online advertising and social changes, tags make it easy to target your audience, leverage remarketing, and test and improve your site (Ironpaper, 2015). Tags are snippets of code or tracking pixels from third-party tools—these tags tell tools like Google Tag Manager what to do. Third-party tools may include paid media tags through Marin Software or Doubleclick, heatmap tools like Crazyegg, or social media ad platform SearchForce (Fig. 2).




Fig. 2: Tags in Google Tag Manager (Nagammai, 2017)

The third party tag has many capabilities: they can ‎attract and show ads to already segmented users, retarget the same users and ultimately increasing conversion rate (GeoEdge, 2018). Retargeting the same user ‎segments enables the identification of specific users that are more likely to convert. Another important and common third-party tag is the Facebook Pixel, which allows marketers to track conversions originating in Facebook to your website, breaking down audience insights from custom audiences to specific actions they take while on the site. The beauty is that if you have the pixel on your website and Facebook knows what a conversion is, they start understanding what type of people convert… and that data allows Facebook to show your ads to people within your audience most likely to perform that conversion (Loomer, 2017). As you can see, third-party tags and pixels are important tools in understanding audiences, segments, activities, and conversions on a website, going beyond the standard tags found in Google Analytics. Management of these tags effectively and painlessly is where Google Tag Manager comes in.

Benefits of Google Tag Manager

With a host of third-party tags available to marketers, Google Tag Manager serves as the glue between the raw data and its output in Google Analytics. The tool provides several benefits to marketers in updating and managing data, while allowing more time to analyze opportunities for optimizations in tactical execution.

Easy Updates - No Developer Required. Google Tag Manager enables marketing team members to make updates and add new tags quickly and easily, without complex code changes to the site that would normally require a developer. This allows the team to test each change and deploy, removing an extra layer of support from a developer and reducing (a) level of effort, (b) budget, and (c) time to launch (Fig. 3).




Fig. 3: Time-To-Launch With and Without Google Tag Manager (GTM) (Fedorovicius, 2017)

A Future-Proofed Website. Google Tag Manager makes future upgrades and enhancements much simpler, since modifications can be made through the interface and not on each page of your website (Ironpaper, 2015). This ensures that global updates happen seamlessly, from one point of entry rather than requiring custom coding on each page of the site, the latter of which would require much more budget, time, and a website developer on hand.

Testing Before Launch. Troubleshooting and correcting tag errors is simplified via Google Tag Manager’s Preview and Debug mode that shows which tags are fired on a page and which are not, and it also includes information about triggers that fire tags and data contained within tracking tags (Fedorovicius, 2017). This is important because marketers can now test quickly and easily if tags are firing correctly before publishing them to the site, reducing risk and errors.

Decrease Page Load Time and Increase Website Performance. Google Tag Manager reduces the amount of unique code snippets installed on each page of a website, thereby decreasing page load time. When certain elements are set to load asynchronously, they branch out and begin to load simultaneously; the page continues to load things in order while the asynchronous components load separately (Meck, 2016). For websites with a great deal of javascript or large, uncompressed images, reducing page load time from other elements is critical. Individual tag code will load traditionally in a waterfall, slowing page load time and preventing loading of your content until other header code loads completely. By moving tags into Google Tag Manager, these tags will now automatically attempt to load asynchronously, which can mean a big benefit for your page speed (Meck, 2016).

Google Tag Manager provides marketers with a toolbox for managing countless custom, third-party pixels and tags whose sole purpose is to provide additional tracking measurements for further analysis in Google Analytics. In addition to assisting in the creation and management of these tags, the tool helps to reduce budget, time spent updating tags, launch risk, and even page load time for our websites.


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References:

Dobson, C. (2018, April 05). Targeted Advertising Requires Good Data. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/05/targeted-advertising-requires-good-data/#7afe0d1829db

Fedorovicius, J. (2017, September 12). Benefits of Google Tag Manager: 13 Reasons to Start Using GTM. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://www.analyticsmania.com/post/benefits-of-google-tag-manager/

Gant, A. (2017, May 19). What is Google Tag Manager and why use it? The truth about Google Tag Manager. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/what-is-google-tag-manager-and-why-use-it/

GeoEdge. (2018). University | 3rd Party Ad Tags – Pros & Cons for the Publisher. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://www.geoedge.com/meetus_university/38/3rd-party-ad-tags-pros-and-cons-for-the-publisher

Ironpaper. (2015, August 15). 8 Benefits of Google Tag Manager. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://www.ironpaper.com/webintel/articles/8-benefits-google-tag-manager/

Loomer, J. (2017, February 10). The Importance of the Facebook Pixel. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://www.jonloomer.com/2017/02/09/importance-facebook-pixel/

Matchett, A. (2018, September 13). Cleaning Data with Google Tag Manager & Google Analytics. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2018/09/13/cleaning-data-google-tag-manager-google-analytics/

Meck, J. (2016, September 21). Speed Up Your Website With Google Tag Manager. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2016/09/21/site-speed-google-tag-manager/

Nagammai, M. (2017, November 16). Why Google Tag Manager? – Nagammai M – Medium. Retrieved November 04, 2018, from https://medium.com/@nagammai/why-google-tag-manager-fc100e99ba3