I’m sure you have all heard of the acronym GTM and I would hope you have all implemented this on your website, however, more times then I care to count people (including some agencies) have not implemented this, but why?
Let’s start at the beginning, what is GTM? Well GTM is Google Tag Manager, GTM allows you to easily add tags to your website for multiple different purposes through a user-friendly interface with an easy deployment process. A tag is any snippet of code you need on your website for any purpose, a tag may be HotJar, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, this list is endless and so are the possibilities.
Diving a step deeper and possibly the best feature of GTM is the ability to set up events to track back into Google Analytics for reporting, after all, reporting is king, and effective reporting is even better.
GTM also allows you to have custom tags on your site for endless options, this will require a developer to implement on the website, but once done you can fire custom tags on the site.
So how do tags know when to fire? This is done through triggers, a trigger is any event that happens on the site. For example, Google Analytics needs to fire on every page, so the trigger here would be all pages, a successful form submission event needs to fire on form submission so the trigger would be form submission. With plenty of inbuilt triggers and tags it begs the question, why do we not utilize this to its full potential?
In my opinion, its lack of knowledge, we too often go down the route of doing something custom with code, but there is no need when you have a pre-existing platform like this that does the job and is proven to work.
So how do we get the knowledge? There is hundreds of blogs out there and Google has hundreds of resources and articles on GTM, but in my opinion, the best way to learn is by doing, so implement GTM on the site and start playing, you will quickly discover the power it has.