In this blog I’ll go into the details of Google Tag Manager and why you’ll still want it even though you have a great developer.
What is Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is Google’s free tag management system. It’s a centralized location for marketers and other non-technical people to add, remove, and modify tags and other code snippets without altering the website code.
The technical definition is helpful, but I find a metaphor really helps drive home what Google Tag Manager does and how it’s different than other Google programs, such as Google Analytics.
Google Tag Manager Is Your Wallet
To begin with this metaphor, think of your tags as credit cards. If you have one credit card, it’s pretty easy to keep track of. This is often the case with people who only have one tag running on their website, for example Google Analytics.
Additionally, if you’ve only got that one card, it’s pretty easy to throw that credit card into a purse without the use of a wallet. Developers have a similar process with your tags – they just throw your tag into a section a website, leaving you to read the every line of code if you ever want to find out which tags you have.
Women, you know that your purse can often be a black hole. And men, although you may not own a purse yourself, if you’ve ever had your wife, girlfriend, friend or sister ask you to find something in their purse, you know it’s not a task for the faint of heart. This is why when marketers began getting more sophisticated with tracking and adding more tags to websites, i.e. throwing more cards in your purse without using a wallet, the need for a tag management system arose.
A tag management system is like a wallet. Simply having a wallet doesn’t mean you have credit cards in that wallet, but now you have a more organized system in place for future cards. You may even decide you want to go back and take some cards out of your purse and put them into your wallet.
While moving all your tags from your website code to Google Tag Manager may be a more time-consuming task than moving a credit card into a wallet, in the end you’ll have a more centralized place to store all these tags and be able to easily adjust them in the future.
Developers and Google Tag Manager
Earlier I said that tag management systems are useful because they don’t require a developer. This is completely true. However tag management systems like Google Tag Manager can be as complicated or as simple as you make them.
Google provides lots of built-in variables for you to use, such as URLs, click IDs, and click text, but if you’re looking to reference more complex conditions, you may want to pull in a developer. A developer can look at the code on the page and then determine whether or not some custom javascript needs to created to be deployed in Google Tag Manager.
Summary
If tags are like credit cards, Google Tag Manager is the wallet that keeps them all in one place. Even if you have a developer, this handy tool is nice for keeping everything in one place without having to interpret any code.