What is GTM?

Simply put, Google Tag Manager allows you to set up customized tracking on your site with ease.  When you implement the container code, you are able to inject custom JavaScript via the GTM platform which can help make Digital Marketing measurement more systematic and simple.

What is GA?

Simply put, Google Analytics allows you to track where your traffic is coming from when they land on your online assets, typically websites or mobile apps.  It also helps you measure your progress towards particular KPI’s you designate within the tool.

Tip #1 – Customize Your GA Account

Google Analytics is a wonderful tool but its not perfect.  In order to have a chance at gaining actionable insights from your data, you must do the due diligence to customize your set up.

You will need to become familiar with the difference between an account, properties in that account, and views for those properties.

Once you have the account structure set up that fits your needs, you can then begin to build out custom segments and filters to ensure that you are removing erroneous traffic and creating advanced segments of traffic that you feel will potentially provide insights to your team.

After you have built those segments and filters you can then begin to research how event goals work and set up custom event goals, dashboards, & reports. In order to create custom dashboards and reports it will also be helpful to understand what scope is in GA and how it affects how data is aggregated.

Lastly, make sure to familiarize yourself with how access permissions work and how to share different levels of access with multiple stakeholders.

Tip #2 – Learn The Basics of How GTM Works

To do your job well and ensure a basic understanding of the technical side of GTM, you should make sure you familiarize yourself with what tags, triggers, & variables are as well as studying how the Data Layer works and how it pushes data into your Google Analytics account.

Download and leverage the Google Tag Assistant Google Chrome extension to help quickly diagnose and debug any event tracking changes that may occur.

Advanced Customization Option #1 – Leverage UTM Parameters & Annotations for GA

Google Analytics does its best job at guessing where your traffic is coming from however sometimes it’s necessary to go a step further and let Google Analytics know specifically where traffic is coming from using UTM parameters.

To make your life easier, you can leverage the URL builder tools that Google has created to ensure that you have populated your links accurately in order for it to read in Google Analytics as you’d expect.

As your marketing campaigns progress, it is also helpful to add annotations in your master view to designate any particular events or actions that happened that potentially could affect visitor traffic.

Advanced Customization Option #2 – Leverage Existing Tag Templates For GTM

If you’re wary about setting up your GTM tags properly you can attain some peace of mind knowing that many of the common marketing tools that require injecting custom code already have tag templates in GTM to streamline the process.

To make your life even easier, Google recently released the custom templates and there is now a curated gallery of custom templates that you can browse and implement for your personal needs saving you time and unnecessary confusion.

Advanced Customization Option #3 – Integrate GA with Third-Party Tools

We now live in a Big Data world.  As much as Google Analytics is an essential tool for tracking your Digital Marketing campaigns, it’s limited if you view it in a silo.

Fortunately, you can leverage other data storage, analysis, and visualization tools to combine multiple data sets from different sources in order to answer overall business questions. Which tools you choose to use will depend on the context of your needs, but here are some common ones to consider: BigQuery, Google Data Studio, Tableau, & R.

Eventually, your business objectives and visitor traffic may justify transitioning to Google Analytics 360 suite. But that is the topic of another blog post in the future.