Google Tag Manager is part of the suite of Google Marketing 360. Google Tag Manager is what is called a “tag manager”: platforms that serve to create, locate, publish and manage easily label marketing in a web page.
To understand what is Google Tag Manager we have to start a little earlier and first understand what are the labels or tags that are managed with the program.
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Tag meaning
When the Internet and the web started to become popular, became a field of business appetizing owners of web pages began to ask questions about your traffic. At first they were simple questions. How many users are entering in my web page, how long they stay there, what pages are the most views...
The logs: what was before the tags and never got to leave it all
The first programs to measure the traffic on the websites is based on the analysis of logs. In reality, this was not even their initial function. The logs are small files that are stored on the server. There are stored a series of information each time a user accesses on one web page. The logs are not invented as a system of measurement.
Originally used to record the processes that are carried out on the server side to find and debug errors. However, soon arose programs specific measurement that used the logs to know how much traffic it had a website, and to understand and analyze that traffic.
The logs are still being used today in the analysis of websites and, in fact, the analysis of logs is one of the trends in SEO, because it allows you to analyze the requests performed by the robots to the web pages and better understand the way in which such robots to access and navigate a website.
And why we stopped using the logs?
Well, as we have seen, in reality we never stop to use the logs, although it is true that it is no longer the most common solution for the analysis of web traffic. The problem of the logs was that they did not contribute a solution to enough practice for the routine analysis of the web traffic.
To begin with, the analysis with logs was too slow, and very sloppy. A little research could involve working with a number of important data. In addition, it required the involvement of personnel with a technical profile. A personal, often, was not used or was unaware of the fathomless needs of marketing teams.
We should add that the analysis of logs was a solution less flexible and with a limited scope to analyze the activity of the users on the web. The market was expecting a more practical solution to analyze web traffic and thus arose the tags.
Now yes: what are tags?
The “tags” are also called “pixel-tracking” in the world of marketing. In fact, the simple name “pixel” is so widespread that, at times, some users find it confusing the way in which mentioned “tags”, and “pixels” in an apparently interchangeable. Well it turns out that this is so because are the terms interchangeable. In reality, it is much more simple than it seems.
Tags are small code snippets that are included within a web page. When the user accesses the page, the tag is triggered and sends the information to the program that makes the analysis of the page.
It is possible that the confusion comes from both “tag” as a “pixel” is commonly used with other meanings in different fields, but nearby.
In computer science it is known as a “pixel,” the smallest unit of color that makes up an image, the little squares. In marketing speak pixel to talk about these small pieces of code that are used for the measurement of web traffic.
For his part, when we speak of tags, we can refer to these tags in measurement, but there are also other types of tags. In fact, all websites are made of tags (that is how to organize the html code), but, beyond that, it is common to speak of tags to refer to the meta, that is to say, the metadata that is in the header of the web pages and they send certain information to search engines or other websites.
The most well-known of these meta tag or meta tag HTML surely be famous “title” and “meta description”. But here we are talking about another type of tags. Here we are talking of tags of measurement, which are small snippets of JavaScript code that sends information to the measurement programs. The most famous of all of these tags is the of Analytics and have a pint as well:
This is the tag Google Analytics Elabs. There are many like this, but this is our.
But what are tags?
As we said before, at the beginning we used the analysis of logs to understand the traffic coming to a website. But the marketing professionals had needs that went beyond those first reports. The tags arrived as the solution to a very clear need on the part of the departments marketing.
It is not enough to know how many users. In reality, they were waiting as water may, especially when emerged the first professional of the analytical started to explain to these departments that, thanks to the tags, they would be able to analyze, not only basic parameters, but also the behaviour of the user on the page, what you click, if you see or do not see a video, if you have added a product to your shopping cart and when you are done with the process or not... The panacea. The tags were easy to create, easy to implement and extremely flexible.
But tags also had several problems. It is true that its implementation is relatively simple, but still required the development team for the installation. Placing the tag in a location that ensures that they are fire -head to our web page and for that you had to touch the code of the page.
The problem of the tags
Here emerged a major bottleneck. It often happens that, when there is a technology or a new tool, the exploration of its possibilities makes about use or use a little way appropriate. Even more so if it is a tool that, basically, is supposed to be reached to satisfy the wildest fantasies of measurement of the departments marketing.
With tags disembarked analysts, reported these departments marketing that we walked into a new era of immense analytical possibilities. Practically everything that they were trying to measure, analyze, classify and evaluate was now at your fingertips, ready to be arranged conveniently in a bar graph and in its consequent Power Point.
The marketing departments responded to the call with enthusiasm whatsoever. They got in touch with the development teams to that provided extensive lists of events that would want to measure for further analysis. On every visit, every gesture, every click and every abandonment should be conveniently recorded.
The problem is that each of these requests involved a specific development. This was not only to create and edit tags in itself. Also put in place the mechanisms for the tags they shot at the right time. Meanwhile, the marketing departments are not allowed for the discovery of new elements to measure And what if my user clicks on the scroll? What of the images in the carousel attracts more attention? What if I want to do tests to check which colors attract more users?
But how many tags can get to be on a website?
Well, the truth is that quite a few. Let's start with the measurement of the web-site. Let's say, for example, that we are a e-commerce. To attract more traffic to our online shop we have created a blog, in which we like to include quite a few videos because we have come to the conclusion that it is the best way to teach our products.
In addition, we have a newsletter and you want to know how many of our users are recorded, both from the blog, as well as from a pop-up that displays when users scroll on our site, and in the process of buying there are two routes: one for users who want to make a purchase and another for users who want to generate a subscription to our product.
To measure each of these actions have to enter a particular code to be triggered in function of the user's actions.
Not only that, but we only work with the tags of measurement. We will have other tags that have nothing to do with the analytics and are used to give different functionality to the page and also tag other websites and other services. The tag of Facebook, the tag of twitter, the tag of Adsense, the tag of programmatic... a universe of tags.
Google Tag Manager
To manage this enormous amount of tags arose specialized programs: the so-called managers of tags or tag management systems emerged to manage the tags of a web page and, in particular, the labels of marketing.
Google Tag Manager was not the first tag manager in the market. In fact, when it arose Google Tag Manager existed alternatives quite deployed in the market. Perhaps the two most widespread were Tealium, and Dynamic Tag Management, Adobe.
However, Google Tag Manager, as before Analytics or Data Studio, has been the tool that has become popular largely thanks to the popularity of Google Analytics has been the head of the bridge that has allowed Google to grow around its entire ecosystem of marketing tools:
- Google Data Studio
- Google Tag manager
- Google Search Console (although this is not in fact a tool of the suite of marketing)
- Google tag assistant
- Google Optimize
- Google Surveys, although the latter two do not have the level of popularity or of the degree of implementation of the above, at least for now.
The strategy of Google with Google Tag Manager it seems to have been very similar to that used with Google Analytics or with Data Studio. To compete with professional tools, complex, with a lot of tradition in the sector, and a huge amount of profits, Google chose to create versions simplest of tools, with a number of utilities are lower and aimed at a wider audience.
Up to a certain point, it is the same thing that happened with Google Drive, for example. This was not to compete with the hundreds of features of Word or Excel, but to put at the fingertips of users a couple of dozens of functions, the most commonly used.
But what is Google Tag Manager?
Tag Manager serves to manage the tags of a web site. The goal of the tool is that users can include new tags in a web page, turn them on and off without the need of updating the code of the page.
For this what is done is to create an intermediate layer, known as the data layer. It is here where you are going to shoot the label that the user sets up in the program.
In this way we get a number of things. On the one hand, we have a control the life cycle of the labels. The user can activate or deactivate them, but also schedule the time that they are going to be operational, in what parts of the page should appear, or by what actions are going to shoot. When you use the data layer changes do not require an upload of new code, it is not necessary to update the website and, therefore, the process is much more streamlined.
What fundamental elements of Google Tag Manager?
With Google Tag manager, we will work with three key concepts: the tags, triggers and variables. The labels or tags we have already been seeing. Triggers allow us to define at what time you are going to activate the tags, and variables as in any programming language, will enable us to store information for later use.
So, for example, if we want to know how many times a user has clicked on a particular button we just need to define the button in the Tag Manager (for example, by your class name or the URL that is included) and store the keystrokes that are made on that button. But not only that. Also we can use a variable, for example, to store the price of the product sent to the shopping cart or the final price paid.
Without a tag manager, all of this would require a specific encoding within the page. Google Tag Manager allows you to perform all these actions with more ease and from an external program.
