Introducing Google Tag Manager

Have you ever needed to make a tiny change to your Google Analytics tracking code, but your IT team told you it would be 6 weeks until the next code refresh? What if you could just log into a tool, make the change, and have it go live immediately – without IT involvement? Now you can.

Google announced the launch of Google Tag Manager this morning at the eMetrics conference in Boston. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that lets you manage the marketing and measurement tags for your web site in one place. This means no more scattering scripts across your pages and waiting on IT to track them down.

LunaMetrics is proud to be one of the first approved GTM specialists, and we’ve been test driving this new tool for a couple months now.

GTM will help make it easier to maintain and update multiple tracking and marketing tags across your site. For example, you can include your Google Analytics tracking code, AdWords conversion tracking and remarketing tags, DoubleClick Floodlight Counter and Sales tags, and even your own custom tags – all in one location.

The difference is that instead of including all of the various tags throughout the page of your site, you include them in GTM. Now you only have one tag – the standard GTM container script – to put on every page of your site. Using the GTM interface, you set up rules and conditions on when to fire each individual tag. For example, you would set a rule to fire your Google Analytics tag on every page of the site.

Although you can’t yet use GTM for testing tags (Google Content Experiments, Optimizely, etc.), that is a “coming soon” feature. You can find out more details about how GTM works, how to set it up and common questions on the Google Tag Manager help center.

Let us know

Will you be using Google Tag Manager? What questions do you have about it? Let us know – the comments are yours!