Google Tag Manager for Beginners: CXL Digital Analytics Week 9 Review
One of the reasons I was interested in the CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree was the entire section devoted to Google Tag Manager.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Tags are snippets of JavaScript provided by third party services. A tag manager is a way to organize these tags efficiently, limiting the need for advanced technical skills. Tag managers help you get visibility into the different behaviors that are happening on your website. Since GTM and Google Analytics are both Google products, the integration between the two makes GTM a popular tag manager.
According to Google: “Google Tag Manager delivers simple, reliable, easily integrated tag management solutions, for free.”
GTM lets you keep all your tracking under one roof while allowing you to free up your development resources. It puts the measurement and tracking tools in the hands of the marketer, who are typically the ones who are tasked with tracking and analytics.
Google Tag Manager is the basic overseer of all the different behaviors on your website. Your job as a marketer is to train it on what to do when people take certain actions and tell it what information to send to Google Analytics. If you have been working all this time thinking Google Analytics is all you need because that is where the metrics live — this is not the case. When you (or other stakeholders) start asking questions that are not being answered by Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager is how you get that information to answer those questions pushed into Google Analytics.
Why is Google Tag Manager so important?
Google Tag Manager is my digital marketing weak spot, and this was my chance to finally master the platform. I find myself going back and forth on if I should even bother with being at in intermediate level of competency for Google Tag Manager. I think they read my mind when they wrote the course goals:
“Google Tag Manager probably isn’t something that keeps you up at night, wondering where you’re falling short skill-wise. But if you’re in digital marketing, maybe it should be.”
If you are working with an agency, they will typically have someone on board who is an expert in the platform. But I like to be a very self-sufficient digital marketer and can install a tag when needed.
As Shanelle Mullin says in How to Get Started with Google Tag Manager :
“As an optimizer, it’s your responsibility to understand the implementation and analysis of digital analytics. Gone are the days of relying on the IT department to help you with basic analytics tracking.”
I also find value in being able to have an intermediate level of understanding of the most popular digital marketing tools, even when you are working with an agency to implement the tools. This helps me work with the agency better and know what is possible when developing my analytics strategy. Knowing Google Tag Manager helps me set KPIs and goals and determine what is important to measure on a website.
“If you put in the work to understand the verbs and the nouns, Google Tag Manager will make your life much easier. You’ll be a smarter, more efficient, more productive optimizer for it.”
I can add a basic tag without consulting a developer, but I started the CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree with a goal of learning more about what is possible with Google Tag Manager, whether I would need to do it or not. Being smarter, more efficient, and more productive is exactly the type of digital marketer I want to be.
So, let’s dive right into the Google Tag Manager Intermediate course review.
What you can expect from this course
The Google Tag Manager for Beginner’s course is a 7-hour, 19 lesson course led by CXL fav, Chris Mercer. It promises that students will be able to “apply basic GTM knowledge for increased power and control over data measurement.”
Mercer is one of the reasons why I was looking forward to this course as the turning point in my understanding of Google Tag Manager. He has a knack for taking technical content and making it easily understood and enjoyable. And with this course, he did not disappoint. Its obvious Mercer finds a lot of value in the GTM platform and it is his mission to share it through an easily digestible course.
“I like to think of GTM like a video game controller. It controls what specific actions get tracked and how they get tracked. It’s incredibly helpful to have all of your tracking in one spot so you can easily see what’s going on and, if you need to adjust or add any new tracking, everyone on the team knows where to do it.”
The course is broken into five sections:
1. Getting to Know
2. Getting Started
3. Tracking Engagement
4. Data Layer
5. Deep Dive
Each lesson in the course starts with a clear overview of what is in the lesson and what you can expect to learn, and is wrapped up with a clear review of the concepts presented. Mercer also provides additional resources you can use to continue learning more about GTM.
Some of Mercer’s best tips are not in the technical implementation of the platforms he teaches in his course, but more so in the measurement and analytics philosophy he peppers in throughout his lessons.
He not only teaches you how to improve your knowledge of the tools, but also how to improve your strategy and the way you work with the tools.
He advises that before you go in and start using an analytics tool, go through a planning process. Spend 15–20 minutes writing down a few paragraphs about how you plan to use Google Tag Manager.
What sort of behaviors are you interesting in collecting?
What will your platforms tell you about those behaviors?
TBV
Trust but verify and test, test, test. Mercer advises you to trust that your tags are working correctly, but always test and verify that they are. He advises that users go slow with GTM. “The slower you go, the faster you get there.” Go slow and triple check everything.
And maybe that is where I have been going wrong with GTM — trying to go too fast. I do feel much more confident after this course. Maybe because most of it covered what I was already familiar with, and this makes me think maybe the tool isn’t that hard after all.
