- Google Tag Manager Tutorial
- Google Tag Manager - Home
- Overview
- Set Up
- Getting Started
- Track Tags
- Organize the Interface
- Publish a Tag
- The Data Layer
- Advanced Tracking
- Google Tag Manager Resources
- Quick Guide
- Useful Resources
- Discussion
Google Tag Manager - Overview
To understand Google Tag Manager, we first need to understand a few related concepts.
Product Marketing - Background
With the advent of the Internet and the web, there has been an immense necessity to stand out from the rest for promoting your product. This era has surpassed the times when advertising and marketing used to work in a fantastic way with paper media.
With the requirement of marketing the product becoming a focused and skillful task, there is a new breed of professionals called “Product Marketers”. These folks are required to be updated with the market trend, user behavior, and the likes and dislikes of their audience.
The product marketer, donning the hat of an analyst and an advertiser, needs to know many things to be on top of things. One such thing is – creating a marketing campaign for successful user engagement.
If we go with the Wikipedia definition for product marketing – Product Marketing is the process of promoting and selling a product to an audience.
In short, a product marketer needs to create various promotional campaigns to stay on top of the competition, thereby increasing the sales.
Since the dot com boom, for a successful product marketing, the presence of a product is required not only in the real world but also in the web world. The presence and acceptance in the web world is directly proportional to the success of the product.
Product Marketing Tools
In this quest of increasing product sales along with being creative, a product marketer needs to be aware of certain effective tools. These tools by themselves prove helpful to market the product and analyze the user trend accordingly.
Following are some commonly used product marketing tools −
- Google Analytics
- Chartbeat
- Kissmetrics
- Sprint Metrics
- Woopra
- Clicky
- User Testing
- Crazy Egg
- Mouseflow
- Mint
Google, obviously tops the list with their offering – Google Analytics. Google introduced this analytics tool very early during the product marketing evolution. Indeed, it is the most reliable and highly used tool in the product marketing community.
The tool has its unique way of operation using a user-friendly interface. The user has to add the Google Analytics Account Number to their respective website/blog pages. Accordingly, the user visits and the clicks are tracked by Google Analytics.
Using Different Analytics Tools
Similar to Google Analytics, every other tool as provided in the above list has a different way of functioning. When it comes to using a particular tool, it calls for having the website/blog code modified in order to start tracking the behavior of the user.
These tools provide an analysis on which page was used at most times, what were the activities performed by the user, etc. Also, these tools can provide a quick feedback in the form of data for the newly launched features.
The way Google Analytics works is quite similar to how most of the other listed tools would work. Now, consider a relatively large product organization, focused on building a new feature to enhance their customer experience. For such large scale organization, it is useful to have huge release processes/pipelines, which get the desired feature out in a seamless way.
Enter Google Analytics. For Google Analytics to be useful, it is required that all the pages in the product website code should have this account number. However simple it sounds, for large product organizations, sometimes, adding a small piece of code in the page can be cumbersome and it calls for rigorous testing after creating this feature.
If the product organization aims to use multiple data analytics tools as given in the above list, then multiply the effort in terms of time and cost by the number of tools in use. This becomes painful as the product matures. Eventually, gauging the user behavior also becomes a must. In such cases, it is important to have a one-for-all mechanism, so that it becomes easier for product marketers to create different campaigns on the fly.
As different tools use different techniques for tracking the user behavior, there is a need to go for a single medium, which accounts for these different techniques with different tools.
Google Tag Manager - Introduction
For a product marketer, to use different tools calls for respective learning curve. Having different tools entails different codes to be entered and hence the changes in the website. If there is a simple and straightforward process of changing the website code, it becomes a bliss for adding the different codes related to different analytical tools.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags. The tags enable site page views monitoring, conversion tracking, etc. Using Google Tag Manager, one can have an effective tag management solution that allows for quick and easy updates in website tags. Tags are basically code snippets, which are intended for traffic analytics and marketing optimization.
For a product marketer engaged in different product analytics solutions, Google Tag Manager is a must have, as it covers many aspects of product marketing under one roof. You can add and update AdWords, Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics, Floodlight and other third party tags using Google Tag Manager.