Setting Up Google Analytics With Google Tag Manager

What is Google Tag Manager?

If you are marketing manager with little to non web developing and coding skills, then Google Tag Manager is the perfect tool for you. Installing marketing tags (code snippets that track behavior of your website visitors) was usually done by the IT department in the company, and every time the marketing manager needed new tags installed, old tags removed or any other changes made, he had to rely on the IT department. This can be very frustrating and time consuming for both the marketing and the IT department.

What GTM essentially does, is allowing you to remove the middleman (in this case the IT department) and install and deploy marketing tags in a easy and intuitive way. Once you install the Javascript code snippet on the website, every marketing tag can be installed through the GTM interface.

Installing GTM on your website is very simple and it is done once. After installing GTM, there is graphic interface that is used for installing all the marketing tags needed.

Installing Google Analytics tag with Google Tag Manager

One of the most important aspect of marketing is being able to retarget the audiences that have already expressed interest in your products and services. Every marketing platform (Google. Facebook, LinkedIn. etc.) has its own remarketing tag, and for our example are choosing Google Analytics. This will allow us to track our website visitors and their behaviour, and based on that create audiences of interest that we want to retarget.

Here is step by step guide on installing Google Analytics code via Google Tag Manager:

1. Open GTM Account

If you already have Google account, then just visit tagmanager.google.com and sign in and simply create an account for the website for which you want to install the remarketing tag on.

After opening a GTM account, you will see the workspace for your tag container where all your tags will be consolidated.

2. Create New Tag

Select the Tag option on the left-hand side menu and then click on the red NEW button.

3. Choose Tag Type

In the next window, select Tag Configuration and then choose Universal Analytics.

4. Select Track Type

Here you can select what you want to track on your website. There are multiple options, but for the initial installation of the code, we want to select Page Views to track all our website visitors.

5. Add Your Google Analytics Tracking Code

To add your Google Analytics Tracking ID, you need to create a variable that can also be used in the future. Select New Variable and then add your Google Analytics Tracking ID in the Tracking ID text box.

7. Set Up Trigger

It is very important to correctly set up upon which action on your website the tag will be triggered. In our case, we want the Analytics tag to fire on every page view.

8. Publishing Your Tag Container

After you complete the tag installation, the final step is publishing your Google Tag Manager container.