What is Google Tag Manger
Google created a tag management system that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixels) on your website (or mobile app) without having to modify access the website.
In a nut shell tag manager is a lightweight invisible container thats on your site. It holds all the heavy code so your site doesn’t have to. You can make changes to the container with out accessing your website. It makes it easy for marketers and agencies to add and update website tags and mobile applications with just a few clicks, and without bugging the IT or webmasters continually.
Setting Up Google Tag Manager
Create a new account and container
A new container is created by default when you create a new account.
- In Tag Manager, click Accounts
- Create account.
- Enter an account name and optionally indicate whether you’d like to share data anonymously with Google and others.
- Enter a descriptive container name and select the type of content: Web, AMP, Android, or iOS. If setting up a mobile container, select whether you’re using the Firebase SDK or one of the legacy SDKs.
- Click Create.
- Review the Terms of Service and click Yes if you agree to those terms.
Install the Container
- In Tag Manager, click Workspace.
- Near the top of the window, find your container ID, formatted as “GTM-XXXXXX”.
- Click your container ID to launch the Install Tag Manager box.
- Copy and paste the code snippets into your website as instructed in the Install Tag Manager box, or download and install the appropriate mobile SDK. See below for tips on web, AMP, and mobile installation.
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Set up of Tags, Variables, & Triggers
Once Google tag manager is set up, we add the tags, establish triggers that cause your tag to fire when certain events occur and variety of variables.
A collection of tags, triggers, variables, and related configurations installed on a given website or mobile app is called a container. A Tag Manager container can replace all other manually-coded tags on a site or app, including tags from Google Ads, Google Analytics, Floodlight, and 3rd party tags. So instead of putting code on the site you put it all in the container.
Tags are tracking scripts like google analytics, or facebook pixel events tag, conversion code. If you want to activate a specific tracking code that is the tag. You can see all the supported tags here
Triggers are conditions when we want the tag to fire. Tags fire based on events, such as when when a visitor fills our a form, a video is played or when a page is visited. Triggers basically pay attention to your site for these events and when they happen direct the tag to start. An event can be a pageview, a click on a button, a form submission, or any custom event that you want to define. There are wide variety of trigger types
Variables are used in both triggers and tags. Variables are data points that contain information. Triggers use variables to filter Information such as a specific url. Tags use variables to capture specific information that can be sent to analytics.
How to add, update and publish tags
Now that a container is installed, you’re ready to add new tags.
- Click Tags from the navigation menu.
- To add a tag: Click New. Select the tag type from the prepopulated selections and then specify triggers for when the tag should fire.
- To edit a tag: Click a tag in the list and make changes on the “Edit Tag” page. For example, you might update the triggers for when the tag should fire.
- To delete a tag: Click a tag in the list. On the “Edit Tag” page, click the
- menu in the upper right corner of the screen and choose Delete.
- Preview mode gives you an opportunity to inspect your Google Tag Manager configuration on your site or app to make sure everything behaves as expected. On the web, you can use the debug option to see which tags fire as you browse and interact with the site.
- From any web page in a workspace with unpublished changes, click Preview. Learn more.
- For mobile apps, read the developer documentation for Android and iOS.
- When you’re ready, click Submit in the upper-right corner of the screen to begin publishing your changes. Add details such as a Version Name and Version description, then click Publish.
Create a new page view trigger:
- Click Triggers
- New.
- Click Trigger Configuration and choose a page view trigger type.
- Optional, but recommended to improve performance: Specify conditions (usually a URL pattern) for pages where you expect a click to occur:
- Under the heading “This trigger fires on”, select “Some Events”.
- Under “Fire this trigger when an Event occurs and all of these conditions are true”, add a filter to enable this trigger only on pages that require it, e.g. Click URL contains /path/to/promo.
- Save the trigger and publish.
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