Something you’ll probably be doing a lot as you run marketing campaigns is inserting snippets of code into various places on your website.
Often the first time it happens is when Google Analytics is set up for a website.
Google asks that a script be pasted into every page, that looks like this …
When you start running ads and measuring results, some other pieces of code can come from Facebook & the other platforms that you run ads on, and a growing number of analytics services.
Tags
These scripts that you paste into your website pages are known as tags and anyone who starts measuring things on the internet and their website soon finds they accumulate a number of them.
They interact with the 3rd-party services you’re using, usually for marketing purposes :
- Facebook remarketing,
- split-testing,
- heatmap tracking and
- landing page applications.
This code sends data back to analytics and tracking programs and in some cases ( like Google Experiments ) redirects people to page variations.
A lot of websites are built with content management systems ( CMSes ), where you can log-in to manage pages. And lots of CMSes and their themes and templates provide fields to paste in code for the entire website as well as for individual pages.
But it can still be tricky, and if you begin playing with tags to any degree it can become time consuming.
Google’s Tag Manager
The tag manager is another free, quality service from Google and there are some big advantages …
- You only have to add one script to your website ( for the most part – there are still exceptions ) and whenever you need to add or remove a new tag you can log into the Google console and do it there.
- You don’t have to edit the website pages or find other people to do it for you.
- The tag manager often speeds up page-load as well because Google handles the loading quite well.
- Google handles the firing of tags at the right moment and also allows a bunch of other things to be done from their console.
It’s worth testing. Go to https://www.google.com/analytics/tag-manager/ and sign into Tag Manager using your Google account.