What is Google Tag Manager

What are tags in Tag Manager?

Tags are small code inserts in the backend, or code guts, of our website that allow us to send certain information to external applications or measure certain events on our website. See the example illustrated below For example, there is a tag within Google Tag Manager which is the Universal Analytics tag. This tag, once implemented on our website, will send all the necessary information to Google Analytics to measure the sessions that our website has had, the users, the page views, etc … Another example of a tag within the Tag Manager would be to introduce the Hotjar pixel, an application that allows you to generate heat maps of our website to see where users have been browsing for the longest, where they have clicked, etc … Other examples that Tag Manager labels allow us:

• Form submissions
• Video views
• Conducting surveys
• Generation of heat maps
• Remarketing
• File downloads
• Clicks on certain links
• Items that are included or removed from a shopping cart
• Ecommerce transactions
• etc…

Disadvantages of Google Tag Manager

Depending on the label, it still requires some technical implementation

Although GTM helps reduce developer dependency, it does not completely eliminate it. Someone still needs to add the container code to every page on your site. And while GTM has plenty of tag templates to choose from, which are easy enough for a non-developer to implement, the custom tags are more complex and will likely require the help of someone who really understands the code.

Tag duplication

Triggers

Each label on your GTM must serve a specific purpose. Perhaps you want a label to send information when someone downloads a file, when an outgoing link is clicked, or when a form is submitted. These types of events are triggered by triggers. It is important to note that each tag you create must have at least one trigger and it may have more than one. If you create a label but it doesn’t have a trigger assigned to it, it won’t send any kind of information to any external application and therefore won’t do anything. Triggers can be divided into two main components: events and filters. When you go to configure a trigger in GTM, you will see a long list of types of triggers to choose from. These are your events. Once you choose an event, you can configure your filter. Filters can be divided into three parts:

• Variables
• Operators
• and Values

We’ll talk more about variables in just a minute, but in this case, it refers to the type of variable involved. The operator tells the label if an event equals (or if it is greater or less than a certain value, contain a certain value, etc.) And, of course, the value is the condition that must be met. Although the word “value” is typically used in reference to numbers and prices, remember that in this case, it does not necessarily have to be a numerical value. In many cases, your value will be something like a URL or a keyword. For example, suppose you want to analyze how many people read the blog content on your website. You could create a tag with a scroll or scroll event trigger that fires when it reaches 75% of the page content viewed. If you wanted this to be activated on every page of your web page, you could leave the “All Pages” option selected in the trigger settings box and you would not have to create any more filters. But since we are focusing on the content of the blog, you should choose «Some pages» and you would create the filter of «Page URL» «Contains» «cronuts.digital/blog». There may also be some circumstances where you don’t want a tag to be activated. In this case, you can create a lock trigger to prevent it from triggering on certain occasions. You should know that GTM prioritizes lock triggers over other triggers, so if you have a lock trigger that contradicts a condition set by another trigger, Google Tag Manager will follow what is specified by the lock trigger.