5 ways to make it LOAD FAST: Google Tag Manager and Page Speed

do you get difficult questions from your it department or your colleague web developers on the impact of Google tech Management on your paid load times or do you want to optimize your Google tech manager container to load faster so your page speed score overall will increase then this is the video for you so in this video I'm going to give you five tips how you can improve the impact of Google tag manager on load times plus a sixth bonus tip at the end all right let's go [Music] welcome to the channel my name is Leon this channel exists to help you make better decisions in your daily work using your analytics data and if you like what I'm doing please click the like And subscribe buttons down below that would really help me get this channel off the ground and also if you're interested in more videos on how you can set up Google tech manager and Google analytics there's a link in the video description to a playlist full of videos just like this all right today we're gonna talk about the impact of Google tech manager on your page speed score and I want to start by sharing a little bit of my own story because I did not start as a web analytics consultant actually I started out my career almost 15 years ago as a ux designer front-end developer and this was in the time that Internet Explorer version 6 was still a big thing you had to take into account so you can imagine how many years that was a go I remember that we were paying a lot of attention to efficiency and optimizing page load times because around that time the network speeds were not as good as they are today so we had to be very careful careful about everything that we put on there to make sure that the pages were loading quick I also remember that we put a lot of our customer sites online and after they went online a bunch of marketing people would come by and ask us to implement all kinds of tracking scripts which of course would bring down the load speed where we paid so much attention to that those tracking scripts would bring back the page loads of those sites and I remember that was very frustrating back then at this moment I am exactly at the opposite side of that story because I'm now putting tracking scripts on other people's sites and I can imagine that they feel very frustrated about that as well but especially in the last couple of weeks I've been thinking a lot about the side effects of what we're doing and that's why I made this video about Pace load times because I believe that putting tracking scripts on websites should not impact page speed scores that much and I can show you by going into my own site here so I have my own site and this morning I ran it through the page speed inside test as you can see my site gets a score of 9 94 and you will find out that if you run this multiple times that it will fluctuate a little bit but it is possible to have a good page speed score even if you use Google tech manager Google analytics or whatever kind of tracking script you want to use and in this video I'm going to give you five tips that I use to go about and decrease the load times of Google tag manager containers so let's go ahead and start with the first tip and that is to separate your container from the website because it might be that you run your test and it ends up in red maybe a score 40 maybe a score of 60. but you're not satisfied you want to start by finding out where the opportunities are you want to start by finding out what causes the page speed to be so low is it the website or is it Google tech manager and if it's Google tech manager what in Google tag manager causes this load time to be so low and I do this by going into Google tag manager and I go into admin and I export the entire a container to adjacent file and if you've done that you can go into admin again and then create a new container you can just call it test.com or something like that choose web and then import that container over there and that will give you a space to test and I've already done this I've created this container I've called it in the back platforms now because this is my testing domain so the first step will be to just export your container put it in a test container that you can use elsewhere and the Second Step here is to if you haven't already just purchase a small hosting package I've used this site for years one.com I'm not affiliate I'm not a sponsor or anything but I really like this it's super affordable and the service is very good it's super stable and I have purchased my own testing domain and I have a small package here so I can do these kinds of experiments if you don't want to purchase a hosting package yourself you can maybe ask around maybe a friend of yours or a colleague has some place where you can use but I I have this and I logged in and I put a blank HTML file in a folder and I called it index.18 launcher and if I browse to that file it you see it's in the YouTube folder and then speed test and an index.html you will find a blank file and what I'm going to do I'm gonna put my test container put it on here and then see what the impact is on load times and by doing that you remove your entire site out of the equation and zoom in on your container and see what the impact of your container is on the site so that would be my first tip to remove the website out of the equation by making your own test container putting it on a test page like this and and see what the impact is but let's go ahead and see what the impact is of my test container because I've made a test container containing almost 60 tags and this is not uncommon for containers these days that I work with to have so many tags and then I have two ga4 configs one site specific one Global Tech I have still some Universal analytics Stacks in here meta ads I've got my cookie Bots banner and I've got a whole jar tag inserting a feedback widget on the side and as you can see I'm using a lot of e-commerce events here both on the site specific and also on the Global Tech so I have a lot of duplicates here Universal analytics some tags here meta ads have some text here so this is the container that I'm going to try to optimize today so let's start by going into my blank page that I put on my hosting package here this page doesn't contain anything no tracking scripts just an H1 header I can go into the source code here as you can see it's just a very simple there's literally nothing that can slow this page down and if I'm going to run this page in the page speed test app we'll find out that this will score a hundred out of a hundreds so let's wait until the results are in there you go the results are in this page scores 100 out of 100 and that's because this page doesn't have anything to slow it down what I'm going to do now is I'm going to open up my testing container I'm going to open up the container code right here I'm going to insert my container in my blank page so the first stamp it should be at the top of the head here and the second snippet should be at the top of the body here so there you go and I saved it so now if I refresh this page I see that a lot of things are loading for example this cookie banner and this feedback widget over here now I can run the exact same page through another page speed test so let's click analyze now we can find out what the impact is because we've separated entire website out of the equation by inserting the container into a blank page a blank page has a score of 100 and now we can find out what the impact is of just adding our container and now the score just by adding the container to this page is 65. so I went ahead and I opened a blank page feed score and I'm going to track the results so results of our container it's a full container gets a score of 65 and very bad at calculating things myself so I always use a typing machine and I'm also going to document the report by making a link right here so the impact of just adding our full container is 35 points which is a lot so just a quick recap you can diagnose the impacts of your Google technology container but just removing your container and put it on a blank page and just run the blank page and the full page through the PHP test and that way you'll find out what the impact is of just the container so that's the first step the second tip is you can go into Google tag manager and if we're going through my testing container here you will find that not every tag here is a tracking script there are a couple of tags here for instance this cookie Bots and this whole jar Banner that are actually inserting things into the page and my experience is that these texts actually have the most impact on the load times if you use them in Google tag manager so my second tip would be to remove these at least temporarily from your Google technology container to see what the impact is of those stacks on Google tag manager so I'm gonna go ahead and start by removing whole jar so I'm going to delete it I'm going to submit remove holds jar so and in my notion page I'm going to say hold gr removed and let's see what this does to our page speed score so I've removed all gr I'm going to refresh this page and what we'll see if I do this a couple of times that holds your feedback which is gone now so I can go ahead yeah and just click analyze once more yeah results are in 68 so let's fill this in our table 68 so it had small impacts so it's a little bit better so the impact of a container is still 32 points on the PHP test I'm not satisfied with that so let's go ahead and also remove our cookie Banner our cookie Bots you do not want to do this on a live site but we're on a testing domain on a testing container also so we can fiddle around and see what's happening if we remove a certain thing so I'm gonna go ahead and remove this remove cookie bolts put a new row in my table because we want to document what we're doing cookie bolts removed I'm refreshing my testing page and Google is gone now so I'm gonna rerun this speed test and let's see what the results are so the results are actually a lot better now so we're at 88 so the impact of our container has gone down to only 12 points to give a small recap my second tip would be to go ahead into your Tech management container and localize the non-tracking script so there are usually a couple of tags in there that actually insert things onto your page and those are usually the texts that slow down the sites the most and by removing these and testing again we can show what the impact is of just removing those elements and as you can see here just by removing cookie bolts and whole TR we've already saved 23 points on our page speed test so these two tags have the most impact on the page load from the whole container so what should you do with these decks well I've got a couple of ideas one idea is just to remove them all together sometimes this is possible for instance hotjar it might be that you're just using this feedback widgets for instance for a couple of weeks but if you don't use it actively remove that from your site because that will go a long way sometimes you're not able to remove it because you really need it then as you saw the question do I need it on every page or can I insert it on a couple of pages because that will slow down a selection of pages and it's of course better than the whole site but if you want to use them or you need to use them on low page for instance the cookie Banner we cannot usually Cannot drop that very easily there are a couple of things that you can do you can remove it from TAG manager and move it into the source code sometimes that will help by speeding things up so another thing that you can do in Google tag manager is if you have your whole yard tag so I just removed it so I'm going to add it back again so if you have your hot yard Tech what you can do is not use all pages trigger on it because that will load it at the start of your page loads what you can do is you can make a new trigger call it window load it and then choose this window loaded trigger type hit save because if you use it you are way trading with loading hotjar until the entire page is loaded and in the past I've had good results with using this technique you're kind of postponing the whole chart so what have we done so far we've removed the website out of the equation by putting the container on a blank page so we can see the impact of the tag manager as a whole and the second thing that we did is we went ahead and went over all the non-tracking scripts so the scripts that are adding things to the sides because those are usually very heavy and by just removing it you can see where the big wins are but sometimes you can look for Alternatives loaded in a different way load it on a couple of pages or just load it in a specific time frame and then remove it after a couple of weeks when you don't need it anymore so far we've diagnosed where the big gaps are so now we're left with a container that has only tracking scripts in it because I use Google analytics 4 I use my old Universal analytics config I use meta ads and I have some JavaScript at the bottom that I load and still we have of an impact of 12 points and I want to know if there are ways to decrease the impact of these tracking scripts the third tip that I want to give you is go ahead into Google tech manager and look for text that you do not use anymore so right now I'm still firing Universal analytics text through my container I want to go ahead and remove these because I don't use them anymore Universal analytics already stopped processing my data anyway so I can go ahead and remove all my Universal analytics tags from my container yeah I don't have any left so I'm going to click submit remove UA tax and it might be that you don't have Universal analytics text but every container that I open almost has some old campaign tax that were relevant maybe a year ago that aren't relevant anymore and I advise you to go through your container at least two times a year just removing tags that you are not using because that will clean up your container and increase load times so let's see what the impact is of removing Universal analytics here so I published my changes I'm going go ahead and refresh my speed test page put it through the test so the results are in that the score right now is 96 which is already pretty good so I'm going to document it right here so by removing the universal analytics text my score is 96 and the impact of the container compared to a blank page is only four points I think that's already pretty good so first step is diagnose the impact of the full container the second tip that I gave you is remove the non-tracking scripts things that put elements on the page see what the impact is of that and the third tip is remove unused decks and right now we're already down to an impact of four points on the page speed test the fourth tip that I want to give you is to go into triggers enter variables and you will notice that there are a lot of triggers here that are not used anymore because we removed a lot of tags but we didn't remove the associated triggers well one tip that I want to give you is there's a there's a site called gtmtools.com it's made by Simo ahava I really like this site because it gives you the opportunity to make block changes in your Google tech manager account very quickly and I went ahead into GTM tools I already logged in I'm going to look for my test container right here and if you open up a container you can go into workspace mode and in workspace mode you will find text triggers variables and I'm going to open up the triggers and all the triggers here that do not have any tags associated with it they have this delete button and I can go ahead and walk through this page and delete all the unused triggers from my container now I'm gonna do the same with variables I have one unused rival I'm going to click update workspace so we do not have workspace changes yet but if I click update and then let it run for a while we will find that this has made 15 changes and we can see what they are here we removed a lot of triggers so I'm going to submit this remove then used triggers and for variables so I'm gonna publish it I'm gonna refresh my page I'm gonna rerun my pagebeat analysis yeah results are in it's actually the same so this didn't do a lot for our page speed score but still it's nice to clean up our container so the fifth tip that I want to give you to decrease the amount of text in your container is to actually combine tags together whenever that is possible so as you can see here I have a couple of e-commerce events right here so I have a few item lists select item view item add to cart remove from cards all the way up to purchase and then I do that again because I have a second configuration so I have as a total of 16 e-commerce Stacks now it can actually decrease that to just two tags by just combining those together let's show you what I mean with that so I'm going to remove all the e-commerce tags here I'm gonna remove all the e-commerce Stacks here as well I'm Gonna Leave the one at the top intact I'm gonna delete it I'm going into this view item list and what I'm gonna do is right now I'm firing a view item list event and all these parameters are the same with every event tag and then I fire this on The View item list event what I want to do is I want to remove this trigger I want to make a new trigger called event e-commerce and this is the way I'm going to set this up I'm going to make a custom event and enable the use regex matching I'm going to use a roof character and a dollar character and in between I'm going to put some records that means that it's going to start at the beginning and it's going to end at the beginning and in between I'm gonna put all my e-commerce events that I have active on this side so view item list view item select item I have add two cards I have remove D from cards I I have View Cards begin check out and I've got purchase so this trigger doesn't respond to one e-commerce event in particular but it's going to respond to every e-commerce event that I've implemented on my site I'm going to save this so right now this tag doesn't only fire on view item list but it fires on every e-commerce event and I'm gonna use the event variable in the event name box and I'm going to rename this to e-commerce because this is the tag that's responsible for every e-commerce event on this site I'm going to hit save and now because we have two ga4 tags I'm going to duplicate it so I can use the the eCommerce events also in my Global da4 account so now I combined 16 tags into just two tags and there are probably more opportunities for these kinds of optimizations in this container as well for instance the login and signup events are they both have shared parameters so I probably can combine these and combine these two and combine the login sign up here as well so again I have some triggers that I removed from all the tags and I can delete the add to cards the individual e-commerce triggers here as well because I've made a new trigger that fires them all to update workspace updates refresh so I combined all ga4 e-commerce event tax into two let's get publish let's refresh the page let's analyze again and let's see what this does to our page speeds score yeah results are in 94. so as you can see the results will fluctuate a little bit over time so we're basically at the same level all right up to this point I've shared with you five tips to decrease the load time of your Google tech management container and the first tip was to just remove the site from the equation by copying the entire container to a test container and put the test container on a test page it'll be just a blank page just to figure out the impact of just the container on the page speed test a score the second tip that I gave you was to remove all the cookie banners and things that put widgets on the page to remove those texts from the container to see what the impact of those taxes on the page speed score and after that we've removed all unused tags removed all unused triggers and variables and we've combined different text into one tag so the final tip that I want to give you as a bonus tip is to offload a lot of text from your client-side container into a server-side container and went ahead and made this server-side container and in this container there are tags for ga4 Global there's a tech for ga4 and then my site-specific domain and there's a meta ads tag and what I can do here is I can remove all duplicates so I have this global at number two so all my number two texts can go so I can overload these from my container so remove them here delete and I can remove all my meta ads tags here this is not recommended if you look into the meta ads documentation they prefer a redundant setup where you have both the client side and the server side tracking in place that will give the most data but if you're really looking for optimizations of your pagebeat score this might be a good option to only use server-side tracking so let's remove these also so I'm gonna delete this and I'm going into my ga4 config tag and I'm going to say I want to send this to my server container which is https GTM in America plus NL there you go and I'm going to submit this so I'm going to say offload text too server side TTM I'm going to hit Douglas and the second thing that I want to do here is I want to go into my server container and I'm going into clients into GTM and I'm going to enable my GTM container to load from this server so what I can do in my source code instead of loading the Google tag manager script from googletechmanage.com I can load this from GTM dot in the workplatz thoughts you know this is my server domain so I'm going to submit this let's refresh our page let's run it through the page speed score again and now our page speed score is back to 100 because we offloaded a lot of our text to a server container we even loaded our Google tech manager Snippets from our own domain and now our page speed score is back to 100. so getting a good page speed score while using Google tech manager and trackers is possible alright that's it for today I hope you see that getting a good Patriot score is possible even if you use Google tech manager and even if you use tracking scripts I hope this video was helpful I hope it was clear if you have any comments please leave a comment down below also if you like this video please click like And subscribe to the channel that really helps me get this channel off the ground alright I hope you have a great day and I'll see you in the next video goodbye

Channel: Leon Korteweg

Views: 5,042

Keywords:

Id: VwRfLzXOJZs

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023