Tag management is an important part of SEO management but one that is often underused or even underestimated by many business. Part of the problem in the past has been the difficulty in keeping these up to date and ensuring that your content has all the right tags associated with it in the first place.
The Google Tag Manager is designed to simplify the whole process through a central dashboard and it’s something all businesses should be using.
What Are Tags?
Tags are little snippets of code that can be used for data collection and sharing between different parties. While there used to be just a few that you had to worry about incorporating into your site, over the last few years this aspect of web and app design has grown considerably.
A well-known example would be Google Ads and Analytics tags which send information to Google about how your PPC campaign or website is performing. The average site can now contain a few dozen up to several hundred tags and keeping track of them is key if you want to optimise your site.
Google Tag Manager Basics
Essentially Google Tag Manager helps you monitor all the tags you deploy on your website or mobile app. It also provides a range of tools to control how these tags are used and operated within your online eco-system. If you don’t have a tag management solution you will need to add each individual tag manually to your site and set parameters – something that can take a lot of time and can lead to mistakes because the code is added or formatted incorrectly.
Google Tag Manager gives you access to an easy to use interface that simply identifies the tags you want to add and does all the hard work for you. There are two separate managers for web and for mobile apps and all you need to do is add the relevant code to your pages to get up and running. The manager uses a range of triggers and other variables to basically control when and how these tags operate.
Tags can fire for a number of reasons – when a user first opens up a page or a certain action is taken, for example. You can specify on the manager when a tag is used. If you want it to fire every time a page opens or if someone clicks on your shopping cart to buy a product are just two of the options. Javascript data layers can be used to manage the type of information your site collects and, combined with triggers, can monitor specific events and send the data to destinations such as Google Analytics.
Google Tag Manager Set Up
The set up for Google Tag Manager is fairly simple and if you’re familiar with the analytics side of things it shouldn’t present any problems. All you need to do is to set up your account and create a container for your website. Google then produces the code which you copy and add to your site. Finally, you can quickly migrate all your tags into the manager. The process is similar for mobile apps, you simply select that option before you begin.
With website and mobile app becoming more complex, having a dedicated tag manager is vital for any website. It enables you to keep track of all the tags you have on site and makes it easier to change and monitor performance as well as add new tags in the future.