An Introduction to Google Tag Manager

An Introduction to Google Tag Manager

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AfChip Kaye
juli 29, 2014
FFW Blog - illustration

When Google Tag Manager and Drupal work together, great things can happen. Both from a web developer's perspective and from a marketer's perspective. We'll take a look at how it all comes together.

Drupal has always been a great platform for product marketing, and its longtime support for Google Analytics - aka "GA" - is just one element in that ongoing success and expanding uptake among marketers.

That said, as with all marketing services, Google Analytics has an achilles heel when it comes to managing, updating or customizing your website's marketing assets in response to changing marketing needs: your marketers have to engage with a technical resource to implement and deploy changes.

With staff schedules, miscommunication and formal deployment procedures in the way, even simple marketing related site updates can be complicated, delayed or just derailed completely.

Until now. Google Tag Manager - aka "GTM" - can go a long way toward solving this exact problem and more.

Here's the big idea: think of GTM as providing you with a funnel where at any time you can add, change, or remove marketing tags running on your production website.

The spout of the funnel is lodged in your website, the funnel itself is a single GTM tag - aka GTM "Container" - running on your site, and the GTM dashboard is the open end of the funnel through which you can manipulate your marketing tags from any service provider - e.g. Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Double Click, Mediaplex, AdRoll, Bizo, etc.

GTM is a large system with the power and flexibility to provide marketers with the ability to invent and deploy several marketing assets. But we have found with that power comes enough complexity that GTM remains little known and perhaps misunderstood since its initial release in October, 2012.

However, with even a limited understanding of its most basic features, marketers can take a quantum leap forward in quickly deploying marketing assets and gathering targeted website usage data.

The power of GTM is so great that we are going to take an in-depth look at the product in a series of blog posts. We will look at GTM from two distinct vantage points - the marketer and the web developer - hopefully encouraging you to consider how GTM might expand the marketing punch of your Drupal-powered website, stay tuned.