GTM acts as a middleman between your website or mobile app and third-party tracking tools, allowing marketers to collect data and analytics by injecting various tags for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more, directly into their digital properties. This centralized tag management system streamlines the process of adding, editing, and disabling tags, making digital marketing efforts more efficient.
As mentioned above, by using GTM, you can manage and deploy marketing tags on a website without having to modify the code. You can also integrate easily with other marketing tools and platforms such as:
But what can you do with these integrations? Yes, they help you to track almost any kind of event or user behavior you can think of. Here are some examples of commonly tracked events:
We should keep in mind 3 main elements of GTM, which are Tags, Triggers, and Variables.
They are the snippets of JavaScript or tracking pixels from third-party tools that you want to implement on your site or app. In other words, they are like observers you put on your website. to keep track of what users do, like clicks or impressions.
Some of the examples are Hubspot, GA4 tracking code, Salesforce or Airbridge’s tracking links.
They define when and where tags should be executed or fired. Every tag must have at least one trigger so GTM knows under which circumstances to fire the tag. For example, you may only want your support chat to fire on pages in the checkout funnel. In this case, you could add a variable telling the tag to only fire on page views of pages with “/checkout/” in the URL.
Page views, Link clicks, Button clicks, Form submissions, File downloads, Scroll depth are all examples of Triggers.
They are used to store and retrieve values that tags and triggers can use, providing additional flexibility and control. It means they help define precisely what the tag or trigger is supposed to do. Let’s take “Page URL” - a common variable, as an example. If you wanted to track page views of your checkout page, you’d have to assign the “Page Views” trigger. But to specify the checkout page, you’d have to assign the Page URL variable and add the URL for your checkout page.
Some more variables that you can refer to are Click URL, Click ID, Click Class, Page Path, Form ID, Scroll depth threshold
Despite requiring a bit of technical savvy, GTM is still worthwhile for advertisers (partly because it is free!) because of these following reasons
Overall, GTM helps implement GA4 on your site but they serve different purposes; GTM facilitates tag management while GA4 focuses on data collection and analysis. They are different in many facets:
