What is Google Tag Manager?

You need to implement this tool in order to monitor what your visitors are doing on your website, whether they are making purchases, where these visitors are coming from and so on….

The best way to explain this by example is: Just imagine you have an organization and it has some websites. In order to properly measure whether these websites are contributing to your business success is to use third party tools like Google Analytics or Google Ads and that’s where you as a marketer, web analyst join the process.

In order to do that you need to add several pieces of Javascript code to the website. At least to get some basic tracking and that's why you need a developer to add some code here.

The problem here is that you need some third person to do that and this process will consume so much time.

And that’s where Google Tag Manager enters the game because whether you can implement the majority of code by yourself.

You should not eliminate a developer from google tag management. But you would be able to track a lot of standard interactions such as clicks, scrolling or other interaction mainly by yourself.

Google Tag Manager is a tag management solution which acts as an intermediary between a website) and 3rd party tracking tools. All you need to do is to add your tracking codes to GTM and then configure rules when they should fire (on page load, click, form submission, etc.).

Imagine that Google Tag Manager is a toolbox, where you keep all your tools: a ruler (Google Analytics), a hammer (Google Ads), etc. Google Tag Manager also lets you test your tags to make sure they are triggered when you load a page or click a particular button.

Another great benefit: you can change your tags and the way they work without actually changing the source code of your website (which you may not be able to do because of slow release cycles or busy schedule of developers) - instead you just edit tags in GTM user interface and publish changes with a click of a button. Many beginners confuse Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager by asking which one should they use now.

The answer is actually both. These two tools do not replace each other, they work together. Google Analytics is a tool that collects visitor data and displays it in various reports, while Google Tag Manager is a data transportation method. It catches website interactions and sends the data over to Google Analytics or any other tracking tool.