29 Advanced Google Tag Manager Tips Every Marketer Should Know Presented by Mike Arnesen

[Music] so we're gonna go from storytelling to deep deep geek this is gonna be super tactical there's not gonna be any story here so apologies in advance well we can start with a little bit of a story I first came to Moscone in 2012 it's an attendee and honestly I didn't tell anybody this but like it was my dream that I never thought would happen that I'd actually be a featured speaker on the mosque on stage yeah the community speaking thing was awesome I never thought I'd come back so I'm here to tell you today the Google tag manager will literally make your dreams come true we're gonna be carving a lot in a really short amount of time I did the math on it and I have about 68 seconds to cover each tip and you could easily spend an hour talking about any given tip here so you're gonna want to access this full write-up that we put together with tools and resources at up bill do slash GTM you can reference that and each slide is gonna have a link to the specific tip on it I want to get on the same page before we get started with what exactly I'm going to cover in this talk probably goes without saying that I'm gonna cover 29 ways for you to level up your Google tag manager usage I'm gonna show you advanced analytics applications we're gonna talk about conversion rate optimization website personalization and even good old-fashioned SEO I'm really excited about that stuff I'm also going to prove that Google tag manager is the best tool for your money I mean it's hard to beat free right so unless you have like a hundred thousand dollars laying around and you could purchase an enterprise-level tag management tool Google tag manager is gonna be the way to go and I think it's a great strong point for the tool because there's no barrier to entry if you want to mess around for a month just getting your feet wet and seeing if it's something that's gonna work for you you're not burning money the whole time but if you do have one of those enterprise-level tag management tools the good thing is these concepts can apply to any tag management platform I'm also gonna give you resources to deepen your expertise unless you have a strong background in front-end web development you're just not going to be able to become a fully fledged expert in GCM in a day let alone a month so I'm gonna leave you with stuff where you can continue to learn learn a little bit more about JavaScript a little a little bit more about the platform and of course give you full details about all the tips and finally I'm gonna open your mind to new possibilities and I know that sounds incredibly cheesy so let me explain I loved watching the movie the Martian and I don't know if this was a common reaction but when I was in the crowd I kept thinking the whole time this is exactly the way I use Google tag manager it validated my entire process for approaching tag management and using it as a tool for SEO which is not what it's packaged for when Mark Watney is on the surface of Mars GCM or hat the hab was his GTM what he did was pulled apart the whole thing took all those pieces reconfigure them in unexpected ways and figured out how to solve his problems with the tools that are available to him GTM allows you to do that pull apart your whole website pull apart JavaScript and come up with cool creative ways based on the challenges that you're dealing with and come up with stuff that other people might not even be motivated to find and you're gonna be one step ahead of the game so let's also talk about what I'm not going to do on this talk really quickly I'm not going to review any of the basic mechanics and installation process for Google tag manager there's just not enough time we could spend an entire day on that so I'm just gonna have to assume a basic level of familiarity I'm also not gonna be able give you the click by click again 68 seconds per tip so go to up build that iOS flushed GTM if you need documentation there I'm also not gonna teach you how to code so sorry will Reynolds but that's okay I read that will and Rand are committing to learn how to code in 2017 I mean I read it on Twitter that makes it a real thing so they're on the hook now in one last thing I'm not gonna drop a knowledge bomb today and then leave you hanging if you have any questions on GTM you want to talk about any of the tips or you just want to chat me up I'm gonna be around for the rest of my let's go find me be happy to help as much as I can and it's important to note that these tips aren't just for analytics nerds they're for anyone who's up to the task of doing marketing better you could be the one person marketing army in your organization who is tasked with literally everything you might be the savvy Enterprise marketer who is leading the team and intensely driven to get amazing results you could be the efficient idealist who wants to collect the right data in the most efficient way possible with minimal process overhead or it could be the under-the-radar innovator who is going to ask for forgiveness later rather than permission it's gonna hack their way to results if they need to Google tag manager is just going to be an incredibly powerful tool and the more time you spend in it the more you start to see how you can bend and even break the rules to serve your purposes and accomplish your goals so without further ado let's get into some GCM tips I know I talked about not doing housekeeping and this is a quick overview of what these slides are gonna look like but the first tip is going to talk about housekeeping before you get into Google tag manager stuff you want to make sure that you actually have it installed properly there's nothing worse than rolling out really cool stuff with GCM to figure out months down the line that like you add an entire directory where Google tag manager wasn't installed properly so using screaming for all you can set up custom filters to grab GTM IDs off the page you can also set up custom extractions so you can grab any unknown IDs and see if you're coming in blind to a new account for example you're gonna know how many containers are on the site if there's conflicting tags and stuff like that a lot of the stuff that we're going to do is going to involve using jQuery to simplify what we're tagging and Google tag manager now jQuery is not a familiar term for you that's makes it even more important jQuery is a way of simplifying JavaScript it's a library you can load onto your site so you can access click handlers things that are going to track how people are interacting with your site it makes it much much easier for you about 70% of sites on the web over to use jQuery so the chances of you needing this on a regular basis aren't that great but in case you run into a site where you don't have it or you might not have it you can have a workflow and this is admittedly a little hacky to have a tag that's gonna fire in Google tag manager and it's gonna check for jQuery on every page if jQuery has been loaded it doesn't do anything if it hasn't been loaded it will actually go in retro actively add jQuery to your code and then make it so that you can use all these shortcuts to do your tagging from that point forward so we talked a lot about in the analytic space getting clickstream data and understanding how people are navigating through your site out of the box of course we can see page views but we want to be able to see clicks as well how are people using navigation on our site are they clicking on our CTA is that they filling out forms using Google tag manager you can actually do this really efficiently and it's pretty awesome so it up build the way we do analytics is we have two tags that handle all of the clickstream tracking for our entire operation one tag is actually want to start by applying click handlers to anything we want to track so let's say we want to track every navigation element and see which links in the navigation are getting more clicked so we can decide whether we want to reprioritize things if we want to make things take things out because people are clicking on them to begin with we can track all that stuff by applying click handlers to those with jQuery and then we have a second tag that actually just receives data so there's this giant tag that's going to track all the little elements on our site that we want to pay attention to and then a second tag that actually receives that data and pushes it into Google Google Analytics for us makes it much more efficient and this is what the tag looks like it's pretty it's gonna make your eyes bleed try to look at it right now but once you understand the basic template it's very easy to go through your whole site and set this up and so here's the process there's a great Chrome extension called jQuery unique selector so even if you don't know jQuery you can just click on an element it's going to give you this piece of code that you can use to attach click tracking to anything on your site this is something that I think is awesome about GTA GCM you can build out your entire Google tag manager container without having to have any code on your website you can start experimenting test something totally fail go back to the drawing board keep incremental improving things and then finally arrive at your perfected version without ever happening put out something that you're not super confident about on a client site for example or on your site the way this works is that you can enter preview mode and Google tag manager and it gives you access to this awesome debugging panel where you can see all the tags that are firing all the data that's being collected and QA that stuff really thoroughly before you have to have anything actually send into goo analytics and the cool thing is you can use another Chrome extension called GTM injector to spoof having the GTM base code on a site so if I wanted to get Maas as the client for example I could test and build out an entire Google tag manager container without them having to do anything and then as soon as they put that code on the site they're good to go I just kid publish and we're good done we're done Google has been making a big push to get Google tag manager into the enterprise game lately and environments are a big piece of that so if you have a multi-tiered development environment like you have a dev site you have a staging site you have a production site you can configure Google tag manager so that it recognizes all of those and then you can selectively push your code out to the different environments to have your whole team being able to QA things and tests now there's even an additional feature called workspaces that they rolled out just under two weeks ago that makes it really easy to collaborate so if you hop into your tag manager account you start making changes it automatically creates a new workspace for you to do all your working then if for some reason like you're doing a three-day project and GTM you're sick one of those days and somebody has to jump into tag manager and make a change because it's a critical tracking need when you get back GCM is gonna notify you and say hey changes have been made to the Container how do you want to manage these conflicts and you can choose to merge you can choose to overwrite keeps things a lot cleaner so you can have a whole team in GTM now and work together with perfect harmony so we've been talking a lot about conversion rate optimization this mosque on so what happens when you run a great a/b test in something like Optimizely and you reach statistical significance for one of your variations and you need to make that change to your site because you know it's a 20% lift in conversions why wouldn't you want all visitors to see that one option is of course to direct 100% of your traffic into that Optimizely variation for example but unless you're on an enterprise plan with Optimizely you're paying by monthly unique visits so you're kind of burning money if you're sending a hundred percent of your traffic to that just because you can't you get your development team to implement the change permanently what you can do and again this is kind of hacky is copy your variation code from Optimizely just open that up and optimize the editor copy paste that into Google tag manager and that's gonna do the exact same thing except it's gonna be free and sustainable and until you can actually get that physically implemented on your site the proper way it's gonna get you by now seasoned analytics specialists are going to realize of course that out of the box Google Analytics only tracks pageviews if you go to something like a PDF file or an mp3 file Google Analytics doesn't collect any data Google tag manager never loads because it's a file it doesn't communicate with your server that's actually a great reason why you know Sam mentioned the importance of server log files that's where you're gonna get that data but you can't customize a Google Analytics to grab some of that data and what you can do within Google tag manager is turn on this built in variable called click URL and then anytime someone clicks a link on the site you're going to be able to access what that URL was so you can selectively to start tracking any URL that's collected that ends with the file extension that you care about so whether that's PDF CSV PPT all that kind of stuff you can track that in Google tag manager using really simple functionality that's already pretty much built in same thing with downloads that happen from offsite sources so say you have a sales team that's sending like spec sheets or about PDFs white papers to protect prospective clients you want to be able to see if people are actually downloading that information and you're not gonna be able see it because it has no relation to your website even if it's hosted on your server but what you can do with GTM is set up a kind of pseudo intermediary download page just a blank page it says like hey please be patient while we're preparing your download it's gonna flash for like a quick second but what you can do in that quick 1/2 second is tag that information send it to Google Analytics and actually implement a redirect in Google tag manager to carry them forward to the asset that they requested so you just have the asset specified in your query string have your sales time you have your sales team you use that rather than just the raw link to like a PDF for example GM's gonna recognize which asset they want like that data in GA and then redirect them to their final destination outbound clicks on your site very similarly you want to be able to see not only when people are coming into your site but when people are going out now I've seen people track this kind of going a little overboard in Google Analytics where you get the full URL for every single outbound link tracked within your reports and you have this massive report of like 20,000 links and it's not really that actionable doesn't tell you a lot about user behavior but what you would love to be able to see is like what sites in general are people most attracted to so you want to see how many people left our site to go to Moz how many people left our site to go to Wikipedia how many people went to a page on Google's Help Center so what you can do is configure another auto event variable to grab the host name whenever somebody clicks a link and if that host name basically the domain name if it doesn't match the site they're currently on meaning it's not your site you send that to Google Analytics classified as an external click now this is something that can get a little confusing and we see the terms cross-domain tracking confused a sub-domain tracking pretty frequently but they're very different and there's different applications for both subdomain tracking it should probably go without saying is when you have different subdomains that you have users navigating back and forth between Deb Macomb doesn't actually exist just for purposes of illustration so don't try to go there there's nothing there so if they have the dev site and the Moz site you want to be able to track people going back and forth the way that cookies are set with GTM is a little problematic because it starts from the left-hand side and things don't really match up so you can actually do a quick setting change within google tag manager and set what's called cookie domain to auto not the most intuitive thing but what it does essentially it just flips the order and starts applying the cookie from the right-hand side and it sets in the same place so everything communicates properly and everything is sunshine and rainbows cross-domain tracking is something that you want to choose carefully the only reason you'll really want to do this is if you have multiple domain names that are all part of the same user journey so the most common application is if somebody has to go to a third-party site to check out on your ecommerce site like Shopify as a common one you'll want to set up cross-domain tracking you can do that by setting a low linker to true in your Google tag manager settings put in the domains that you want to link in these cross domain settings so a comma separated list of all the domains that you want to appear as one unified user experience and then you have to hop into Google Analytics and set up that referral exclusion list you need to do all three steps or won't work it's very common to leave one of those out so we talked about subdomains so if you have subdomains you want to be able to see the full hostname Preta energy a reports you don't want to have you know moz.com slash abouts and then let's say there's an about page on the dev site dev dot Moz com slash about by default you're just going to see a big lump of traffic under slash about when you look at your who analytics reports so what you can do is print the full hostname so you'll actually see wwm ayahs comm slash about and Deb dot lost comm slash about C that unique traffic broken out properly and basically all you have to do is overwrite the page path when you're sending data into Google Analytics it via Google tag manager stripping out personally identifiable information is pretty important and not something that you necessarily think of so personally identifiable information is something you are forbidden according to Google's Terms of Service from sending to their servers for any reason so this is a legally sensitive topic so it's important to remember not a lawyer but there is a big risk if you're caught for any reason by Google sending things like email addresses credit card numbers into your Google Analytics account they are going to potentially if they catch that wipe out your entire GA profile not just the specific kind of view that's continued that is contained within the profile they're gonna take out the whole thing even if you have unrelated sites in there they're just going to wipe it all out because it's a violation of their TOS so really really be careful and it's not enough to apply Google Analytics filters because that happens after the fact the date has already been sent to Google so Google tag manager everything that it does happens before any data is sent out for processing so you can use UTM to intercept that without getting into this it's pretty complicated code you'll be able to access what this script looks like is creating a JavaScript variable that's going to receive any query string parameters it's gonna check for sensitive information like emails or credit card numbers it's going to leave any non PII information intact and replace that personally identifiable information with a warning message this is a little bit what it looks like it's actually based on a post by a guy named Samoa hava it's kind of like the get the godfather of google tag manager he's awesome so I've kind of modified his script which originally only looked for email addresses to also look for credit card numbers so you set this up you're always protected because it's always going to recognize that if it's being passed in and it's gonna give you a message if it ever is found and then at that point it's up to you to pull out your detective magnifying glass and figure out why you're getting PII in the first place so yo dog we heard you like variables so put variables in your variables you've seen this in a couple examples whether or not you realized it but Google tag manager has this awesome ability to be able to combine variables to form other variables or to form different tags based on other variables that you set up it sounds pretty complicated I had a good example here which I actually don't like anymore because there was a better example published on yuma's it was actually a post about setting your canonical tags using Google tag manager and grabbing the HTTP protocol as it variable grabbing the hostname as a variable and grabbing the page extension as a variable and using that to form one mega variable is composed of three for the canonical tag and then using GTM to output that onto your site that was pretty cool there's a link to that notes by the way if you work in b2b marketing or any kind of lead gen you know the importance of paying attention to both Google Analytics data and CRM data it's actually pretty easy to join these two data sets using Google tag manager what it really relies on is finding a unique key that both data sets share so that you can merge them together now every CRM system is going to have a unique ID for any recognized user so somebody fills out a form or they register for a webinar part on Marketo Eloqua HubSpot they're all going to set a unique ID for that user in the user's browser GCM has built-in variables that can grab any cookie for you be easily so you just find out what the name of that cookie is then you pass it into Google Analytics with all the rest of your data every time that cookie is picked up and then at regular intervals export your data from the CRM along with that unique ID and then have their lead status next to that have their lead value next to that and then you can upload that using the universal analytics import functionality and see that data within your Google Analytics reports it's really cool you can even get more complicated and try to automate the whole thing but really cool possibilities there and Mike over important wrote a great post on that so definitely check that out and that's something else as well so this is something I kind of like recreationally enjoy watching debates about people love to argue about what a data layer is how it fits into web technology at all so I'll kind of just talk about it in the context of Google tag manager so anything that we interact with that our users interact with on our site is what's known as the experience layer it's all the front-end code it's what people click on so if people convert on the application layer is what powers that the database it's the server and that's what makes the experience layer possible but what if there's information that you want to track in Google Analytics because that top layer is where 99% of the stuff within GA happens that's actually why Samuel the community speaker was talking about like you know server logs are the only true accurate source of getting your your 100% accurate traffic because if something goes wrong at the experience layer if somebody's not using Java Script if information isn't printed correctly that visitors not getting it picked up but the server layer is accessing that from the application layer so what if there's something like the logged in state of a user you want to know how many people on your site are visiting who are actually people who are logging in you can print that information to the data layer which is an intermediary kind of layer in between and Google tag manager has functionality to be able to grab that in or grab that variable out of the data layer without having it without necessitating that it goes to the experience layer and then you can put that into Google Analytics as well so we talked a lot about content at Moscone and I think we know by now that creating content for the sake of content is completely worthless you need to create content that helps people you need to carry content that tells a story you need to create content that engages that isn't going to get people to go right back to the search results that's not going to help your perceived quality for your site so let's talk about ways to measure that tips 16 17 and 18 are going to give you different ways to measure engagement on your content so measuring scroll depth is one that we can start with so we want to see how far people scroll down our long landing pages if you have a sixteen thousand word blog post you want to see if people are actually spending time on that and getting all the way to the bottom there's a great plug-in at parsnip that you can use free to use and easy easy easy to put in to your site via Google tag manager now 17 gets a little more advanced and I think it provides more meaningful data you can observe dwell time meaning how long are people spending on a page and then fire off an event after a user has been there specific a specified amount of time the issue with Google Analytics for better or worse is that these metrics like bounce rate and time on site are calculated between successive hits so a page view is a hit and the second page view in a user's journey is also a hit what happens if someone only looks at one page and they're there for 20 minutes and they love the blog post they buffer it and then they leave the site Google Analytics is gonna say hey that's a hundred percent bounce rate that's a zero seconds time on site because they have no frame of reference to say okay where was the second point that we can calculate this map from so with measuring dwell time what you can do is fire an event after a specific amount of time to negate the bounce right show that was actually a sticky visit and actually get an accurate time on site so you can do something like say a flat twenty seconds and say any page all over the site if somebody stays on twenty seconds we're gonna say that's good or you can get more complicated and use JavaScript to count the number of words on the page divide that by some number you're comfortable with find what feels like a good range divided by ten divided by fifteen divided by twenty and then convert that to milliseconds and then use JavaScript set timeout method to fire off an event to GA once they're on a page for the specific for the specified amount of time so on a home page maybe you want them there for twenty seconds before you're considering them a sticky visitor on a blog post that's going to be more like two minutes because it's much much longer based on word count now monitoring pogo-sticking is a really cool idea it's probably the most experimental thing in here so take this recommendation with a grain of salt and just as a note this is 100% not my idea this guy that I mentioned previously seemed oh he came up with this idea - okay let's figure out how we can monitor how many people are coming from Google search results to our site then calculate how long it takes for them to bounce back to the organic search results so we can monitor that and make sure that's not going to impact our rankings in a negative way so when somebody comes in from Google you can actually use Google tag manager to log a new browser history entry you're kind of faking a new browser history state with GTM then if somebody clicks on the back button it's going to try to convert that browser history event to a blank string Google tag manager out of the box can pick up on that and you can say okay now let's actually fire a tag into GA with how many seconds they spent on the site say they were someone who bounced back to the search results and then manually invoke the previous browser state to send them back so there's a lot that can go wrong here you're creating fake browser and browser history entries you're intercepting your users requests before you actually send them on their way so again take this with a grain of salt and if you're going to do it experiment and test and then experiment and test again make sure it's going to work on your site configuration but pretty cool opportunity nonetheless of course if you're working in GA and you're paying attention to that and that's how you're calculating your success you want to make sure the data is not getting muddied by your own team's traffic so the traditional way to do this is filtering out IPs within Google Analytics that however does not take into account people who maybe are working from home if your entire team is distributed if you have people traveling and if your office doesn't have static IP IP addresses it's nearly impossible to maintain this with any sense of reliability so what you can do on top of IP filtering is define a parameter that's going to indicate someone's on our team and we don't want them in our Google Analytics account you always want to have an unfiltered profile to always collect any data regardless of where it comes from but you can set up a filter view that's going to say this is not including people from our internal team and you could set that up with GCM so that's listening for that parameter and you send this link to everyone in your organization so say you send email and then you instruct folks to open this on every browser they do work from on every device and then those are all gonna be tagged to be excluded from your Google Analytics now this is some really cool stuff updating metadata you can actually update the metadata and other content assets on your site for SEO purposes using Google tag manager this is crazy that this kind of happens a lot but I've seen it so many times throughout my careers you write some really cool metadata for the site you like okay we've tested this in PPC we know it's gonna lead to an increased click-through rate and then the clients like okay well we can't get that implemented until next month or we have a homegrown site that doesn't have a CMS and we need to hire a developer to be able to make that changing like really so what you can do is pack it together and get by with Google tag manager you can actually inject a tag into the site that's going to identify what element you want to change and then override it this page I'll not build the page title is just analytics using Google tag manager we've actually injected a script onto the page overwritten the page title and Google within two weeks actually crawled it executed the code and is returning that in their search results I've seen people do this on larger scales as well but it's worth noting that if your site has a lot of JavaScript complexity like it's a node.js app or an angular app Google is probably gonna give up executing JavaScript after a while so if you a lot of stuff going on you might your mileage may vary but if your site is relatively simple like 99% of WordPress sites you're probably gonna be able to do this so cool thing to start pushing a little bit on and see how far you can get with it another cool one everyone who knows me knows I'm a geek about structured data so back it's Search fest earlier this year I spoke about this idea of using Google tag manager to dynamically push out json-ld markup so we can be eligible for things like you know blog post markup recipe rich cards all kinds of cool stuff along the lines of products but when I spoke about it originally it was kind of theoretical and I didn't really have the JavaScript know how to figure it out but luckily his guy Chris Goddard who works at SERPs com he's a much better coder than me and he figured and he posted on the Moz blog a couple months ago so link to that in the notes and so a client came to us and said hey we have a recipe site we have thousands of recipes we add new recipes every day and we want to be eligible for Google's new recipe rich cards on mobile you guys heard about that it's really cool it's you know designed to make the mobile experience easier but it relies on structured data in json-ld so how could we scale this out without having to require that client to loop in a bunch of additional dev resources to actually change their content management system we could use GTM to do it the process involved taking that json-ld template stripping it down to its bare skeleton so it's just this kind of rough container and then within Google tag manager you create a new variable to pull in each relevant data point and then use that to populate that json-ld shell and so we push that out with Google tag manager across 1,500 pages and awesomely enough that validated in the structured data testing tool it showed up in the search console reports and most importantly it actually led to generating recipe rich cards and the mobile search results so a quick one if you don't have the standard version of internal Site Search tracking you want to be able to see what people are searching for in your internal search results so you can actually hack this together and say you know if you don't have question mark search term equals XYZ but you have some different format you can actually reconfigure your query strings or your URLs for that matter within Google tag manager and put them into the expected format the really cool thing there's a blog post on that that gets more into detail I don't want spend a ton of time on it right now but check that out now I wish there was a one-size-fits-all solution for this so it's becoming more and more common that we have these dynamic web apps that don't really behave in the expected way the Google tag manager out of the box is going to be able to track so if you have a like an angular app that users can navigate through and the URLs don't necessarily change like will Reynolds yesterday show that example from Callaway golf where this is a golf club finder and you want to know how far people are getting into that but URLs don't change events aren't firing off in the expected way you can't actually use your traditional methods there so you have to kind of figure out whether you're gonna use advanced listening whether you know what to ask your developers very nicely to include a data layer in there so you can get that information but really you just have to experiment and get more and more familiar with Google tag manager so you can kind of take those things as they come now fortunately if you are on angular there's a great new project in github that will allow you to seamlessly integrate Google tag manager functionality into your angular app I personally haven't used this yet but the people behind it are wicked smart so check it out the measuring video engagement of course like if we're going to create a video content we don't want to just put it on site and be like okay we create a video good we're awesome we need to see how many people are watching it when people watch the video are they more inclined to actually convert for us we're gonna know what that video is paying off if you're using embedded YouTube videos on your site you can actually use a plugin that was created by Cardinal path that leverages the YouTube API to track video progress at predefined points 25% increments pretty cool stuff or you know what if you don't want to hack it together just use Wistia like an adult I'm not being paid to say that but I love Wistia and their analytics integration is off the hook you don't have to do anything and you can have data start coming in to your analytics immediately without having to set any settings so makes your job a whole lot easier now Kara on day one mentioned looking in Google Analytics to see where people were abandoning forms to id8 hypotheses for your CRO testing the complication is that's not a default thing you have in your Google it expand you need to set that up so using Google tag manager what you can do is as people start editing progressively more and more form fields and it forms to say this is like six form fields long we're going to progressively add information into a JavaScript array and say okay when they edit the first field they got to name by the time they get to the third field they've got to name they've got to email they've got to organization if they abandon the form we have a rule that says okay then send that data into GA so we can see a full report of where people are abandoning forms and where we need to possibly improve with ciara testing if your site is ad-supported you're relying on that revenue you really want to understand how many people are blocking ads on your site so this is another thing you can kind of hack together there's no really good way to do it and especially if an ad blocker is blanket blocking any requests to google.com because they're serving so many ads it's not gonna load GA it's not gonna load UTM either so there's a certain percentage is never going to be able to track unless you're using your server log files but you can't get an approximation of how many people are visiting your site with ad blockers by actually using GTM to load up basically bait for these ad blockers so you create a script that's something super obvious ad zjs or advertisement yes and that does one simple thing it sets a global variable on your site so using GTM you can see if that has been set if it has been successful you know that there was no ad blocker there if it wasn't you actually returned true and send that information into Google Analytics so after that you'll be able to start seeing reports and say what percentage of our users are using ad blockers that's going to be very important if that's something you rely on so there are great personalization tools out there that you can pay for that are going to do this kind of the proper way but if you need a proof of concept or you just are really limited on budget you can hack together personalization using Google tag manager so all of us likely have some kind of funnel on our site for example one of the clients up build works with solicit gets donations to fund races they're doing in the medical space so we want to see how many people we can get to actually make a donation so using GTM we can set a cookie whenever somebody enters the funnel we know they have intent they're considering making a donation so we set a cookie that says entered funnel we let them progress through and then on the final page on that donation successful page we actually remove the cookie so who has that cookie still at the end of the day it's the people who entered the funnel but didn't yet convert so we can actually use that to fire additional HTML tags on our homepage to say if someone has that entered funnel cookie it means they didn't convert but they're probably going to be more predisposed to actually finishing what they started so we can show different content to them using Google tag manager based on that cookie now this is not something that I came up with it all it's just a post that I saw like a couple weeks ago I was like this is so cool I need to include it in my deck 100% it's a by a guy named Steven Harris over at Cyr if you don't know what a lookup table is it's just a fancy JavaScript variable in Google tag manager that passes in one variable and then outputs something else based on what that is so for example if you have a bunch of domains that you want to track analytics and you have you know site one in site two are supposed to send their information to one Google X property the dev site has their own depending on when you know whether they're on domain to domain 3 or domain 5 they send you a specific one so you have all this complication and those can be really hard to maintain they can be very time-consuming to build out if you have hundreds of rows there so Stevens solution allows you to not only scale that very efficiently but actually use regular expression matching in there as well which is really really cool so you can take something like this and condense it down to this using his method so check that out it's worth reading for sure and the way that that one works is it actually uses Google sheets to help you generate that lookup table and then creates an exported Google tag manager and container that you can import into your account and get all those variables preset up for you so what I want to talk about here for tip 29 is actually further leveraging that import functionality so to get to the heart of it really what this boils down to is when you have a whole Google tag manager account and you have all of your tags set up all of your variables set up all your triggers set up you can recycle that work and get yourself a huge head start on a subsequent project by exporting that full container and importing it into a new account you can get yourself you know weeks ahead of the curve if you need to so what I want to do for Moscone is make up builds standard Google tag manager base container available to everyone here so this contains all of the tags that we just talked about right now plus some other stuff that we use on a daily basis we use this to pre basically pre populate all of the client work that we do so I'm making it available to everyone it's a new version then actually people my team haven't even had a chance to play with yet it's called arrow too so check it out go to that link and you can get your copy and for the next 30 days I only want it to be available to Maz Con attendees don't share out the password unless you want I'm not the boss to you but the password is a Roger so let me take a break hacking way too much time I really like this movie kung fury if you guys have seen it it's awesome but at the end of the day you know in the face of these overwhelming challenges in marketing we just have the GTN the is be mark Watney become a student of the Watney school of marketing let the obstacles and challenges that you face shape the way you do things let it motivate you to figure out creative ways to accomplish your marketing goals that your competitors might not be motivated to find and one thing I want to leave you with is that the most helpful thing you can know about Google tag manager is what it really is what is Google tag manager it's nothing more than a glorified JavaScript injector so you don't have to be a coder to get the most out of Google tag manager but anything you can learn a little bit more about javascript whether that's you know five minutes a week that you're just learning one specific additional function about JavaScript it's gonna be very helpful so I want to leave you with some resources here you can download all these of course some tools that you can get some blog posts that you can read that are highly recommended old fashioned books you guys remember those and the course is online to teach a JavaScript most of these are free or freemium and that's it happy optimizing keep moving forward and figure out creative stations [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Moz

Views: 5,121

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Id: qRY0i_SShBc

Length: 39min 27sec (2367 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018