What Is Google Tag Manager And Who Benefits From Using It?
Are you a lawyer or someone who works at a law firm and in charge of the law firm’s website/internet marketing? If so, then you should be familiar with the drill. Anytime there needs to be a change to a tracking code, adding new scripts or removing old ones, you will have to take time out of your already busy schedule to make sure this gets done.
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
- Monday morning you get an email from a company your firm uses to manage it’s Adwords PPC campaigns. They are requesting code to be added to your website so they can track conversions properly. They have sent you the code snippet in an email for you to send your web people.
- Your web people are in the middle of wrapping up a project for another client and can’t get to it for a few days.
- After it is done you get a call that the code isn’t tracking properly.
- You have to spend the rest of the week working back and forth between 2 different parties to add a simple piece of code to the website.
- The following Monday it is live and working properly.
The main cause of delays and headache is from the process it takes to add a tag (code snippet) onto a site. Specifically, the person that wants the code on the site can’t add it themselves. This is precisely what tag management software aims to solve. But they can be expensive. Google Tag Manager is FREE!
7 Usefull Features of GTM
- It’s Free! Can’t beat that price and, with a quality company like Google behind it and having been around since October 2012, you know you’re getting a solid product.
- Efficiency: Changes and new Tags can be created quickly and easily without requiring code changes to the website. With the GTM dashboard, there is no need to involve a developer once the initial code has been installed.
- Version Control: Every time you publish a change, it creates a new version, which is archived. If at any time you need to rollback to an existing version, you can do so easily. This could be beneficial if you roll out an update that doesn’t seem to be working properly while you have a major campaign going on. You don’t want to miss out on any data, so you can restore the older working version very quickly with version control.
- User Permissions: GTM allows you to set permissions for individual users that include view, edit, and publish. This is how you can give access to third party vendors or marketers like us and allow them to make the code updates they need without involving you, saving you time and headache.
- Built-In Tags: GTM has included tags for classic and Universal Analytics, AdWords conversions, remarketing, as well as other popular ad networks. This further simplifies the process for some of the most common tags found on websites.
- Event Listeners: GTM takes the hassle out of manually tagging each link that you want to track with individual onclick attributes to send events to Google Analytics. Instead, you can target links or buttons by attributes that are already on the link or by using a standardized naming structure like data attributes. This can be a major time saver if this can be done without involving the developer.
- Debug Options For Testing: Just because you publish a tag to the live website doesn’t mean it is working properly. You or a team member can personally test and debug each update in your browser on your actual site before publishing the change using the debug features.
- Multiple Domains or Sub-Domains:
- Multiple Domains: Many law firm websites might have more than one domain. For example, a client of ours has his entire website in Spanish on a Domain name that has Spanish words in it. The site looks the exact same and tracks the same info. So instead of having to update code on 2 different sites, we can use the same GTM code on each site so that changes we make on the dashboard will update on both sites!
- Sub-Domains: The same thing can be accomplished with sub-domains. Attorney websites might have a sub-domain for a version of the website in a different language, similar to the above example. Ex. espanol.lawfirmsite.com. Some firms have sub-domains for each city they are targeting. Ex. houston.lawfirmsite.com. Same thing applies as long as the tags are the same: updating the dashboard can automatically update each sub-domain.
If you’d like to learn more about Google Tag Manager, here is a lin
