What is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager (GMT) defined
In business, the GTM acronym stands for Google Tag Manager, which is free software from Google that allows marketers to install, manage, and store marketing tags without changing a website’s or mobile app’s code.
Marketers use these tags for analytics, remarketing, and conversion tracking across their websites and mobile apps.
How does Google Tag Manager work?
The first thing to understand about Google Tag Manager is that it consists of three elements—Google tracking tags, triggers, and variables.
- Marketing tags are tiny snippets of code or tracking pixels from third-party tools like GA4 tracking code, Hubspot, or Adjust’s trackers.
- Triggers tell GTM where, when, or how to fire, or issue, a tag. Examples include pageviews, form submissions, time on page, and link clicks.
- Variables add additional information needed for the tag and trigger to work like a page URL, a form ID, or Google Analytics settings.
So, marketers can assign a trigger to every tag and variables as needed. That way, Tag Manager understands the circumstances required to fire the tag. For example, a mobile e-commerce app user can trigger a page tagger after spending 10 seconds on the /checkout page.
Additionally, marketers can use Google Tag Manager for SEO purposes like monitoring scroll depth, search bounce rate, and interaction.
Q: What metrics do marketers most commonly track with GTM?
The top metrics marketers use GTM to monitor are engagement events, downloads, bounce rate, video watch times, and page scroll depth.
How do Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics relate to each other?
If you remember, Google Tag Manager lets marketers manage various tags. The tracking code of Google Analytics 4 is a tag that marketers can add to their websites or apps to help them track traffic.
In short, marketers use Tag Manager to specify what information to send to Google Analytics, such as track type, event tracking parameters, action taken by user, etc.
What is a GTM container?
In Tag Manager, marketers need organizational buckets to put different groups of their tags. They do this via a container. A GTM container is made up of multiple web tags or mobile app tags and a set of rules for these tags.
Google Tag Manager provides the following container types:
- Android apps
- iOS apps
- Websites
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)
- Running Tag Manager on a server
After installing a GTM container, you can add tags, verify that they work, and publish them.
Google Tag Manager benefits
Aside from the fact that it’s free for anyone to use, Tag Manager has several benefits that make it popular among marketers.
1. Lessens the reliance on developers
As no changes are being made to a website’s or app’s source code to track code with GTM tagging, companies can save time and money as they reduce their reliance on developers.
2. Ensures tags are correct pre-launch
GTM provides testing and debugging tools so marketers can preview changes before pushing them live.
3. Allows for cross-organization collaboration
With GTM’s workspaces, several employees in your company can work simultaneously and run multi-environment tests without overwriting one another.
4. Easy tag management and storage
By consolidating marketing tags in one place, marketers can work faster and update their Google tracking tags and tracking codes with fewer errors.
Looking for Google Tag Manager (GTM) forums?
Many marketers turn to GTM forums to ask related questions from other marketers utilizing Tag Manager.
The three most popular GTM forums are the following:
Adjust and GTM
With Adjust’s server-to-server integration with Google Tag Manager, our clients can track tags as app events on Adjust’s mobile analytics and measurement platform. Read the documentation on Adjust’s integration with Google Tag Manager.
Want a complete picture of your user journey, and be able to track all your mobile attribution efforts— including GTM tagging— in one place? Then schedule your personalized demo with Adjust today.
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