DIGITAL ANALYTICS | CXL MINIDEGREE | REVIEW FOR WEEK 11

4 min readMar 6, 2022

In the last blog post, we talked about Data Presentation & Visualization and also we talked about Facebook Analytics concepts and its capabilities in detail. In this blog post, we will talk about Google Tag Manager with the last and 11th parts of CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree.

You can go to the CXL website from here.

1. What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool from Google that makes it easy for you to add and update your own tags for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more. There are nearly endless ways to track activity across your sites and apps, and the intuitive design lets you change tags whenever you want.

Benefits of Google Tag Manager

Easy to use and easy to launch.
Increase your agility.
Deploy Google and third-party tags.
Collaborate across your organization.

Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics

GTM is all about managing tags. GA is itself a tag and is used for tracking website analytics. They are simply different tools for different jobs. GTM is a user-friendly tool for managing website tags without having to go into your raw website code. GA is the most widely used analytics tool on the market. It helps you collect, process, and analyze website data.

Google Analytics’ main job is to generate reports about your website like how many users saw the website on a specific day, from what regions, what sort of web browser they used, which pages were the most popular, etc. GA accomplishes all of these by putting a “tag” on all of your pages which is a javascript code that runs on the user’s browser and tells Google that the user is accessing that page.

Getting To Know GTM

1. Tags

Tags are basically code snippets used for traffic analytics that tell GTM what action to take on that page. In GTM, you can configure those tags and publish them, and set the rules about how they fire from within the Google Tag Manager interface itself. GTM Supports several Google and third-party tag configurations. Also, you can create custom tags for the tags that are not supported.

2. Triggers

Every single tag on a website serves a specific purpose. For example, you may want a tag to send the information when a user clicks on a particular link or when a person downloads a particular file. All these are types of events and all these events in GTM are called Triggers. All the tags need to be assigned at least one trigger so that they know what to do when or what information needs to be sent back when.

Variables

Variables are nothing but values that are used in triggers and tags to filter when a specific tag should fire. The tags are dependent on the triggers and triggers are in turn on the variables. Consider variables to be value holders for the triggers. The tag does the comparison job where it compares the value of the variable to the value that is defined in the trigger. It matches the rule and the condition, the particular tag will fire. Also, variables are important because they are reusable. They can be reused between the tags.

Data Layer

In the context of programming, the data layer refers to the data structures and databases. Consider a Data Layer to be like a list of business requirements. To put that in perspective; think of an e-commerce website, its business requirement would look like details about purchases, visitor data, timestamps, emails, subscribers' information, etc. Now the data layer is that virtual layer where you can store data (about requirements that we talked about above or any relevant data). From the data layer, GTM can read that information and use it in tag, triggers, or variables and send it to other tools as well as GA, Google Ads, Facebook Analytics, etc. From a technical point of view, Data Layers are JavaScript arrays that store data and transmit information from your website to the Google Tag Manager.

Preview Mode:

GTM’s Preview & Debug mode lets you browse the website with your GTM container installed and preview how things would work i.e. how the tags, triggers, and the variable will be implemented.

With GTM, you can track specific user behaviors using:

a.) Click Triggers

b.) Click Variables

c.) Timer Trigger

Click Triggers — Click triggers are used to fire tags based on the click events.

Timer Trigger — Timer trigger allows you to send events to the Tag Manager at timed intervals.

Click Variables — There are different types:

a. Click Element — will return an HTML element that was the target of an auto-event action.

b. Click Classes — will return a string contained in the className attribute value of the auto-event element

c. Click ID — will return a string contained in the id attribute value of the auto-event element

d. Click Target — will return a string contained in the target attribute value of the auto-event element

e. Click URL — will return a string contained in the href or action attribute value of the auto-event element

f. Click Text — will return a string contained in the textContent / innerText attribute value of the auto-event element

YouTube Videos:

GTM can prove to be a very effective tool to get a better understanding of how users engage with embedded YouTube videos on your website. With Google Analytics you can see how many people visited the page containing your video but you won’t be able to see the performance for the video. With GTM’s inbuilt triggers you can track performance on the simplest form with a minimum level of code.

Cross-Domain Tracking:

Cross-domain tracking is a method to analyze visitors across multiple websites in a single analytics view. cross-domain tracking allows you to report on the traffic of multiple websites as if they were one big website.

Tag Sequencing:

Tag Sequencing is the process of creating sequences of the tags to be fired sequentially.

The concept here is to create a pipeline kind of setup for the tags in your container.

See you next week with a new blog post containing details from the CXL digital analytics mini degree program.

Thanks,

Ayşe Fırat