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Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to efficiently and easily manage your web tags.

They're those pieces of website code that - as Google reiterates - give you the ability to ‘measure traffic and visitor behaviour, understand the impact of online advertising and social channels, use remarketing and audience targeting, test and improve your site, and more.’

How easy is it for a Marketer to use Google Tag Manager?

The placement of tags to a website has for the most part been something given to webmasters or IT specialists to handle historically.  This is because the task was often perceived to be challenging, problematic or simply just too time-consuming.

Google Tag Manager has managed to change this perception.

So much so that by utilising this tool, marketers are finding it far easier and quicker installing and managing website tags themselves, without constant recourse to a web developer or IT department.

As a result, IT overheads and time consumption are being reduced significantly, building new campaigns has become considerably quicker with little to no reliance on the speed or reaction time of a web developer, and rapid access to crucial web analytics and data has increased substantially.

So how exactly do you use Google Tag Manager and what advantages are there for a Marketer to bother with it?

It’s relatively straight forward to use actually.  

• Once you’ve signed up for access, you are bought to the main interface of Google Tag Manager where you will have the ability to create what is otherwise known as a container which is added to the body of every website page. This is the only stage that you will need a programmer to install the container  in the page’s code.
• Once the Tag Manager Tag is installed onto your website, you can add all the tags on your own via the container which is provided within the Tag Manager.  This will enable you to obtain the data you need like site traffic, visitor behaviour, AdWords remarketing, and other site analytics.

What other capabilities does this tool have that make it worthwhile using?

• Google Tag Manager allows for multiple users who can create, maintain and publish tags.  Each user can be granted specific access and user permissions.
• Google or non-Google tags are permissible and custom rules can be allocated to each tag so as to acquire specific information from a particular page at any given moment. Tags have the capability of being customised with very little information and without the need for implementing code making life for a user with little to no coding experience far less stressful.
• Code changes to a website are not needed when making changes to a tag or adding a new tag.  This speeds up the process for marketers exponentially because they can implement any testing and change themselves, without the need for an IT specialist.
• You can test your tags before publishing them on your website by utilising Google Tag Manager’s previewing and debugging features. In this way, you will have advance warning as to whether any errors exist or if the tags are actually working correctly to ensure that the data being received is correct.
• Any version of any published change to a tag can be archived and accessed at a later stage making organising tags an easy affair.
• Data across multiple mobile ready platforms can be attained because Google Tag Manager can be used to manage mobile websites and mobile apps.

Conclusion

For marketers everywhere, the integration of Google Tag Manager into a website has simplified the installation and maintenance of tags extensively, especially when you consider that any one person can manage the process all from one location.

Access to crucial web data, from site analytics to AdWords remarketing and more, storing of analytics information and tracking codes has also never been easier or quicker. 

And being that there’s so much to play around with, from custom tags to different triggers, getting started has never been more appealing.  So get experimenting and obtain the results that will benefit you almost immediately. More information on how to install tags in Tag Manger can be found here.