Google Tag Manager has tools for marketers to deploy tags while helping I.T. keep things safe and stable. This video is an introduction to the basic concepts that marketers will use. Google Tag Manager helps you manage how tags are deployed on your website or mobile app. Google Tag Manager gives you a powerful set of tools to control how these tags are fired and how your tag data is handled using triggers, variables and a data layer. A Tag is HTML code that executes on a page. Tags serve a variety of uses, but most of the tags used in Google Tag Manager send information from your site to a third party. For example, the Google Analytics and the AdWords Conversion Tracking tags send information about certain types of activity on your site to Google. Without a tag management solution, the code for each of your tags must be added manually to the source code of your site. Google Tag Manager simplifies this process. Using the Google Tag Manager interface you simply specify the tags that you want to use and Google Tag Manager does the heavy lifting for you. Google Tag Manager for the web is deployed using a single container code snippet that you place on all your website pages. The Google Tag Manager SDK is used for mobile apps. The container snippet handles the deployment and execution of AdWords, Google Analytics, Floodlight, and other tags you might have deployed on your site or mobile app using Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager uses triggers and variables to control how and when your tags fire. Tags are triggered based on events, and are executed when a web page or mobile app loads, or in response to some interaction on the page or mobile app. In Google Tag Manager, you attach triggers to tags to specify when they should fire. For example, if you attach the “All pages” trigger to a tag, the tag will fire whenever any page loads. Other triggers might be set up to fire tags at specific times, such as if a customer removes an item from their shopping cart or if the user clicks or taps on a button to download a featured app. Variables help define triggers and what data they send. Conditions might include: Specific URLs from referring pages, links, or for the page itself. The presence of specific HTML elements, IDs or classes. Cookie values. Random number values. Or custom values via JavaScript. The Data Layer is an optional JavaScript object that you can use to help manage the information your tags are gathering from your site. A data layer is simply object code that can be used to pass events and variables to Google Tag Manager. To generate a data layer on a web page, you simply create the object before your container tag. For example, if you have a tag that triggers when your customer uses your travel website to look at a vacation to Hawaii, the values can be pushed to the data layer when the page is viewed. A trigger could then be defined to look for destination and travel type values, and configured to fire a Google Analytics event tag when detected to track the data. The data can be collected and analyzed in Google Analytics as custom variables. To learn more about managing tags in Google Tag Manager, visit support.google.com!
