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The Basics: Google Tag Manager for eCommerce

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a powerful tool that can help your eCommerce site track user behavior and measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. While platforms like Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Facebook Pixel do the actual reporting, GTM will assist in installing and managing the tracking, while helping to keep your site code clean and fast. Here are some of the ways using a properly set GTM account can help your eCommerce site thrive in this ever-increasingly competitive market.

What is a tag?

To truly understand the benefits of tag manager, you first need to familiarize yourself with what exactly a tag is. A tag is a small piece of code that is placed on your website to track user behavior. This code is responsible for collecting information about what users are doing on your website, such as which pages they are visiting, which buttons they are clicking, and whether they are making purchases.

For example, if you want to know how many people click on the button to watch an instructional video on your site, you’d add a tag for video play. But why stop there? You can also track how long the video played before the user left the page. How about if they restarted the video to watch it again? Tags can help you track all of those and so much more. 

Once a tag is set up, GTM will automatically start tracking clicks on your video’s play button and storing that information. You can then use this data to generate reports and insights about how shoppers are interacting with your website.

Simplified tag management

Google isn’t the only one that uses tags. Facebook, for example, also uses them. In fact, most social media sites do. One of the biggest benefits of using Google Tag Manager is that it simplifies the process of managing tags on your eCommerce site. With GTM, you can easily add, remove, and edit tags without having to modify your website’s code. 

Instead of having a ton of scripts on your site from 4 or 5 different social networks, you can set them up through GTM and only have one set of tags. All of the needed info will then filter into their respective platforms (Facebook, Google Analytics, Google Ads, etc.), ready for you to access.  This can save you time and effort compared to manually adding tracking codes to your website’s codebase, and it can also help ensure that your tracking tags are implemented correctly.

Better data accuracy

Using GTM can help improve the accuracy of your data by ensuring that your tracking tags are properly implemented and firing (aka recording) at the right times. This can help you get a more accurate picture of how users are interacting with your eCommerce site and where they’re dropping off in  your Google Analytics sales funnel.

While GTM offers a range of basic built-in tags and templates, you can also track the very customized features and additions to your site. If you’ve got specialty tools and resources on your site, you’ll want to know if shoppers are using them, and whether they produce the right result, leading the users to purchase.

Using GTM for eCommerce also allows you to track user behavior across multiple devices and channels. For example, you can use GTM to track how users interact with your site from a myriad of different devices. 

By tracking user behavior across multiple channels, you can get a better understanding of how users are interacting with your brand and what channels are most effective for driving sales.

More efficient marketing campaigns

Google Tag Manager can help you optimize your marketing campaigns by tracking the performance of your ads and website content. When reviewing your analytics reports, you’ll be able to see which of your efforts are garnering the most attention and which ones cause people to click. More than that, you’ll be able to see if those people who click are actually making purchases, or if they immediately leave your site (which could indicate a misleading advertisement).

By gathering this wide collection of data,  you can identify areas where you can improve your marketing campaigns and optimize your website content for better conversions.

Conclusion

Overall, using Google Tag Manager can be leveraged to gain valuable insights into user behavior and make data-driven decisions that can help drive sales and grow your business. If you don’t already have GTM in place on your site and are interested in a more rounded and comprehensive approach to analytic data, reach out to us. We can help get you set up to earn more efficiently.

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