Get Started with the Basics of Google Tag Manager - GTM Lesson 1

What and How to Use Google Tag Manager, Quick Tutorial - Get Started Here

Hi everyone my name is Dany and in today's video I'm going to start a new series talking about Google Tag Manager.


This first episode is going to be broken down into four parts:

1- What is Google tag manager ?
2- Who is the target audience who needs to use it ?
3- Why do you need to use Google tag manager ?
4- How to use Google tag manager ?

What is Google tag manager

well it's a free tool by Google just like many of the free tools that Google provides for web designers and developers and people who are into website implementations also it's a tool that is used to inject or insert tracking and conversion code into your web pages.
You insert code pieces or parts externally without modifying your existing code. GTM includes a set of pre-built custom code from third-party companies that integrate very well with your pages such as double-click for example so you don't need to worry about the particular code that needs to go there. You can simply integrate it using Google tag manager.

Who needs to use Google tag manager

According to Google, marketers around the world can make use of this great tool and in my opinion web designers and developers are also one of the audience for this tool. GTM allows you to focus on data without worrying much about integrating the tracking code or the conversion code into your pages Finally if you're a Content owner or own a blog, and you don't want to worry about how to add tracking code then Google tag manager is for you.

Why do we need GTM

In addition to all the things that we just talked about, GTM is easy to use. Similar to most of Google platforms it's very easy to use and it allows you to bypass your developers and bypass the coding structure. You can directly inject code tracking code specifically into your pages without going through any design or development. What's also great about GTM is the fact that it's centrally hosted on Google servers so it allows you to get more reliability because you're not relying on so many different third-party platforms all the code is in one place hosted on fast servers by Google. That's a great plus, your tracking code and conversion code is organized in one place so you can get to it anytime. You can make changes in one place! Finally what I love about GTM is its version control publishing features.

You can backtrack, go back in time to a certain implementation without having to worry about backup. It is really a great tool!

How do we implement Google tag manager

This is going to be the next part of a series of videos which I will walk you through one video at a time, one implementation using Google tag manager at a time so we'll do different magic tricks for your webpage to track different things using Google tag manager. Obviously you can do it through code but Google tag manager gives you more power, control and ease. That's why we're going to use it in the series of videos.

There are four parts that you need to understand while working with Google tag manager and I will walk you through these parts as we navigate the Google tag manager's dashboard. Let us start by naming them. We have the Tags, Triggers, Variables and Folders. In my opinion it should haven been called objects.

Let us dive in right now to the dashboard that you would see when you sign up with Google tag manager. As you sign in, you can see an implementation of few websites. "NewSoon.com" is the one website that has been setup earlier. It has its own tags, triggers, variables and folders.

Tags is basically the place that holds your code whether it is CSS, JavaScript, HTML or any tracking code that you can get from another third-party website and that you need to add into your home page. This is where you will create.

Triggers are basically what starts or what initiates tags, for instance you might not want to fire all your tags or you probably don't want to fire a tag on all your pages. You might want to be very specific about firing it on a Thank You page for example or on forum submit page. Depending on where you want to fire or start those tags you need to structure your triggers around it. Triggers is what calls a tag and makes it happen and we will be discussing triggers in detail in the upcoming videos.

Variables are basically very important because they can make our life simple and organized. I would like to use variables as much as I can. For instance I have my Google Analytics tracking code or tracking ID which I have implemented as a variable and whenever I need to call it in Google tag manager; I basically reference the variable instead of the actual number or the actual ID. We are going to see that implementation soon.

Folders are basically all the different things that we just talked about tags variables and triggers Google likes to call them folders in my opinion they should have called them objects because that would make more sense folders just kind of make things a little bit confusing for for me and I'm sure for many others but just know folders is basically everything combined together. If you want to have a view of your tags and triggers and variables combined together that's where you need to go.

This concludes today's episode, the first video of Google tag manager, the very very basics. In the next videos there's going to be a series of around 10 to 15 videos specific to Google tag manager. How-to series of videos; so how do you add Google Analytics code or how do you add Google Ad conversion code or AdWords conversion IDs into Google tag manager and a lot of great tricks that you will definitely enjoy.

Bonus video on the new Google Tag Manager Changes introduced in 2017

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