Warning: this is a techy blog. It’s written for people who are trying to up their marketing game on their websites and manage some of the tech-side of things themselves. 

Reassurance: we still use non-jargony language to help you get your head around the tech. And, as ever, Wild SEO Agency is just one click away from answering all your website questions. 

What is Google Tag Manager? 

GTM – Google Tag Manager – is a free Google tool that gives you the ability to install, store and manage tags on your website without having to update your website code each time you want to make a change. 

Marketing tags are an important part of a digital marketing strategy. They help you to track activity across your website to better understand how your marketing campaigns (such as a signup form to an event) is going. 

What is a tag? 

(great question!) 

Tags are small bits of code in the back-end of your website that track the actions of your website users, and collect data for you to learn from. 

When someone visits your website to make a specific action that is set up to trigger a tag, the tag collects data about their actions and sends it to your analytics tool. 

(To understand a bit more about analytic tools and the many different options out there,  read our blog on analytic tools.)

These sorts of tags are known as marketing tags as they are tracking actions you’ve set up to help sell, promote, engage with your audience. 

Marketing tag examples 

• Form submissions - A tag can measure how many people have clicked to submit a form on your website

• Facebook/Meta pixel tag - tagging your Meta pixel helps you to better understand the actions your audience take when they arrive on your website from Facebook. See what your social media users like (and don’t like) about your website 

• Track PDF downloads - find out what your website users are downloading from your website, and what they aren’t interested in 

Okay, so tags are clever and can give you lots of information. But, there's no point in setting up marketing tags on your website if you can’t manage them, or understand the information they can give you. This is where Google Tag Manager comes in… 

What are the benefits of using Google Tag Manager (GTM)? 

• It’s a free tool 

• GTM codes for you - giving you time back to focus on other tasks 

• Tags improve the accuracy of your analytics system, giving you higher-quality reports and reducing human error 

• It can improve the loading speed of your website - which is a big win for SEO

• Allows you to test different call to actions on your website 

What are the cons of using GTM? 

The biggest con is you need technical knowledge and time to install it, use it and interpret it. 

Google does give some directions to help you install GTM, but we’ve found this step-by-step guide to give you an idea of how to install it , and see whether you want to embark on the GTM journey… 

How to install GTM

Step-by-step guide to setting up Google Tag Manager by HubSpot.

Heads up friends: as informative and helpful as the guide from Hubspot is, it is written assuming you have some prior web development experience, or knowledge. 

And, while we know that after reading ALL of the Wild SEO Agency blogs you are website pros, if you do want some help figuring out whether GTM is worth it for your site, and help installing it and getting to grips with it: please contact the Wild SEO Agency team and we can help you out! 

In the meantime, if you need some more convincing that Google Tag Manager is a helpful tool that could benefit your organisation… Google gives a pretty convincing argument themselves for the benefits of using GTM that might sway your vote.