This week I was speaking with a client about web analytics and how the Siteimprove Analytics service could help out. They have a multi-site setup within Drupal and he made it sound like it would be a lot of work to install the analytics javascript on all the sites. Lots of different places he would have to go, hoops to jump through etc.
I asked if they were familiar with Google Tag Manager?
“What is that?” was the response I heard back.
It got me thinking, perhaps there are others out there not aware what Google Tag Manager can do for them, so I’d thought I’d share.
For those of you unfamiliar with Google Tag Manager and without getting too technical(as I myself am not that technical), it is an easy way for you to add marketing and analytics codes onto your website without getting your developers involved.
Once the Google Tag Manager code is on your site(which you might need a developer for), you can now add new marketing and analytics code on your site through your Google Tag Manager dashboard. No more waiting for a developer to get to it, or having to wonder if it was done correctly on your site.
I’ve had customers who have had to add new analytics code manually on each and every page since their website wasn’t set up the best. If they had Google Tag Manager in place on all their pages, to add a new analytics code on their site, they would just load it once in the tag manager and hit publish, and they are done. Now they can start benefiting from that new piece of software they are interested in right away.
To show you how easy it is once you have tag manager installed. I’ll walk you through the steps to add the Siteimprove analytics code onto your site.
- Login to your tag manager dashboard
- Select “New Tag”
- Select your product you want to add. In the case of adding the Siteimprove analytics code, you would select “Custom HTML Tag”
- Now you copy your analytics code provided to you by your vendor into the configure tag box, and hit continue.
- Now select if you want it to be on all of your pages or just some pages. You can even add events or form submissions if you would like to collect this information. Once you are done, hit ‘Create Tag’ and it will ask you to name your tag. I named mine “Siteimprove Analytics”.
- The last step is to hit the red “publish” button in the upper right corner which then sends this code to your tag manager on your site and will start collecting data.
Overall Google Tag Manager makes it a lot easier to look at new software and can help hide the software/code you are using from others as everything is stored in the Google Tag Manager code, instead of your website for the world to see.
I am by no means an expert on Google Tag Manager. If you do some quick searching on Google you will find a lot more information and tutorials, but just wanted to let folks know about a new service they might not have be aware of.