Embracing Google Tag Manager

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hello. I’m Emma North and I’m the head of SEO here at Koozai. And today, I’m going to be talking to you about Google Tag Manager. Now, for me, Google Tag Manager is really underutilised and undervalued, and it’s a really powerful, marketing tool.

So what it gives us the benefit of is that instead of requiring a developer to make lots of changes to the website — and sometimes, that can be quite frequent, little changes, ad hoc changes that just need to be done by a developer. Once Google Tag Manager is set up, you don’t that developer to make those little changes. Marketers, or website owners, web masters can actually make those changes from within the platform.

And the power of it and the things that you can do with it is vast. And, obviously, I can’t talk to you about all the ways in which you can use it today. We’ve got some blog posts about it and other resources. We’ve got a white paper as well. But, essentially, you can fire your Google Analytics tags, your AdWords tags, your remarketing tags, conversion tracking, event tracking, JSON-LD. There’s so much that you can do with Tag Manager that, essentially, you would have always needed the developer, historically, to do.

And I think the biggest problem with tag managers, there’s quite a lot of fear around it. People kind of think that, “Oh, it’s a big change.” And developers are kind of fearful that some of their power is being taken away and given to marketers, and they’re worried that the site’s going to go wrong. And that’s just not the case. You do need to have a clear plan and you need to know what you’re going to do with it, how you’re going to use it, who’s going to have access, who’s going to do what. Once you’ve got that in place and you kind of get buy-in from the whole team that this is going to work, and it will, it’s a really powerful tool.

So I really recommend that if you haven’t already, have a play with it. There’s so many features to it that make it kind of safe to use. It’s got version control, it’s got user control. You can roll back if anything goes wrong. Definitely have a play.

If you haven’t read up on it before, have a read up because I cannot advocate enough that this is a really powerful tool for marketers, for SEOs, and for web masters. And developers should be buying into it too because it will save them a lot of time in those little jobs that, let’s be honest, they didn’t really want to do. So go and have a play and let me know if you got any questions.