00:00 - Introduction to Google Tag Manager
01:06 - Ease of use for non-developers
03:00 - Creative marketing uses of Google Tag Manager
06:00 - Integrating Tag Manager with e-commerce
10:00 - Managing complex setups in Google Tag Manager
20:30 - Upcoming workshops and learning opportunities

[00:00:00] Today we're talking about Tag Manager and I'm here and this guy's here, Phelan. Phelan, and we're with Seymour Digital Media. And this is mostly your topic, Phelan, because this is your specialty.

[00:00:11] Yeah. Yeah, talking about Tag Manager and why you should be using it. So one of the big ones is, what is it? I guess is the first part. Yeah, it is. That is the first question. What is it? Yeah. And so it's a no code solution. So it doesn't, you don't, It doesn't require any special skills to really use.

[00:00:29] And what it [00:00:30] does is it deploys like your marketing tags, right? So your Facebook pixel, your LinkedIn pixel Google analytics, and you can also set up the most important feature I find is that you can also do, that's how you can do events for your Google analytics. And you're muted.

[00:00:46] If you were going to do a comparison, like if you were going to describe Tag Manager to someone, I know you're loving this from me, how would you describe it to somebody that doesn't know why or [00:01:00] what or how, or anything like that? They just know there's this thing called Tag Manager and why do I have to, why should I be using it?

[00:01:06] Why is it the best recommendation to use? First of all, it's free. That's a big one. Also once it's installed by your web dev or whatever, you never have to ask your web dev to add code. It's super simple platform for making, if I want to start tracking certain things, I don't have to talk to a web developer at all.

[00:01:25] I can just do it all. Is that true? Because you're like, we get hired to [00:01:30] do this. So I'm not often going into Tag Manager and you are in fact, a developer. So tell me, is it easy enough for a layman to use? Yes. Yeah. It actually is. It's you'll need to, it'll, there's a bit of a learning curve on like the hardest part is not how to use it.

[00:01:48] It's to think up the scenario in which you would be using it. Okay. Tell me more. Tell me more. So for example, you want to set up a Google analytics [00:02:00] event that triggers when a page loads, that's the thank you page. Okay. So it's not, the harder part is not. So much like the actual implementation, it's pretty easy, relatively easy.

[00:02:13] The harder part is like thinking up like, Oh, I want this event to trigger because of this specific thing. It's more thinking up the use case, I think it's the harder part that most people will, that I struggled with at the start. Now that I've gotten by sea legs with it, it's relatively easy for me to do.

[00:02:29] [00:02:30] But I think the harder, hardest part for people is just figuring out like, Oh, I want, How do I want to use this? How do I, what events do I want to capture? You, another fun one as well. We've had it where there's like specific pop ups for specific pages. So there could be, any blog post that says that Any URL that contains the word SEO, I want my SEO giveaway pop up to show up there.

[00:02:56] Yeah, so you could set it up where it's like, because we [00:03:00] don't have those pop ups ready. Oh yeah. It's true. It's true. We're not usually part of the pop up family though. Yeah, but those are some fun use cases where you can split out I have a a giveaway that's specific to this topic.

[00:03:13] Anytime I write about it, I want the pop up to show up only for those pages because it's relevant to if you showed up there that you might want to get it downloadable. And so that's a way that you can think about how to use tag manager because page, if you have any time, you have contains a super powerful one [00:03:30] of a condition, right?

[00:03:31] So the URL contains SEO. And so that means that you don't have to do every different use every different URL. It's just as long as that word SEO is in there. Then I want this pop up to show up. And the chiropractor, say, like if you just wanted like the, a chiropractor keyword or like a physiotherapy, like keyword in it, could you make something trigger if that was the thing on the page?

[00:03:55] That's what I'm trying to say. If there's a page and it has like chiropractor on it or [00:04:00] another page has physiotherapist on it, like you could make it so the pop up only shows up on that page. Yes. Yeah, but it's specifically the URL. You want to make it so it's the URL contains a certain word. So that's going to be easier.

[00:04:15] You can do it where it is stuff that's on the page, but that gets way more complicated. It's I've done it for a couple of them where it's when you see the little text that pops up, if you filled out the form and then it's like, [00:04:30] Oh, we had it set up where that was the trigger. And so like on a Shopify form, it would say thank you.

[00:04:35] Instead of redirecting to a thank you page. And so we had to track that little visible element. We did it. It was a lot more complicated that I wouldn't recommend going that route. Doing the URL is actually, I would say, relatively easy for most people to set up. Okay. And with, so what kind of things would you recommend for using Tag Manager?

[00:04:56] Like I, I know it, for, for what I know and how I [00:05:00] speak to it, it helps people with their data driven journey, right? Like you're, so if you're really, interested in doing the right things for your website and what's under the hood. You use tag manager because it gives you more control, like how you'd get maybe a WordPress site over something else because you have more control.

[00:05:19] Is that correct? Yeah. And it's also makes it easier to find it all in one place. It also makes it easier because you don't have to go into the head code. So anytime, [00:05:30] any sort of marketing platform says, Hey, add this code to the head tag. You add it into Tag Manager, that way you have it all in one central location and you can tell which tags you have and how they're set up.

[00:05:40] That'll make your life a lot easier. Aura's asking, can you use Tag Manager with a third party checkout? That is a great question. Let's talk about it. Yeah, so it would depend on who's the, who's the third party. It's depends on what they give you access to.

[00:05:56] So Aura's asking, if I put Tag Manager in, I [00:06:00] won't have to add to the head, header on my website. Just to also clarify, just cause it's, header is like your menu.

[00:06:07] Menu at the top, but like the head code just head, not header. Then yes you would be, that just substitutes all that for you. And it's just go, you go to tech manager and anytime it says add this to the head code to start tracking. Just add it to tag manager. And then if it's something like, I don't know, like a Google analytics or a LinkedIn pixel, then you just add it on condition as all pages, [00:06:30] just the whole site you want it active because there's no reason why not.

[00:06:33] But yeah, it's basically a substitute for doing all that and it makes it a lot easier for you to have full control over it. Also to there's cool stuff as well. We have to put it in the head and the body for tag manager, right? So it's just one tag. And I think Google's changed the name of its tag.

[00:06:51] So it's they're trying to help be less confusing, but it's causing more confusion initially, I think. Yeah. So they've changed it. What are the Google analytics [00:07:00] one? It's like a Google tag. It's a really annoying name change that they didn't really. clarify with the community why they changed it or what, why it just seems really stupid in my opinion of like, why would they switch over to that?

[00:07:12] Oh also, hey, now hey, now, no, I really like that. They've changed the name, like key events from conversions. No, it doesn't change on the reporting. So it's weird. However key events makes more sense logically. So I do appreciate them trying. Let's not let's, We don't know.

[00:07:28] We're not them. I was talking [00:07:30] more about the, just the tag manager stuff is there wasn't any announcement about it. There wasn't any documentation. They just did it. And the documentation is also poorly worded, so it's very confusing very quickly. But circling back, we didn't actually answer Aura's first question, which was about the adding tag manager to third party.

[00:07:50] So the biggest one you can do it. The biggest issue you're going to run into is if you have anything with like e commerce functionality it's really complicated for [00:08:00] you to set up on your own It's easier to use whoever's the e commerce they usually have a put in your google analytics and they spit events back to your google analytics for you so you don't really need it as much.

[00:08:11] Generally, yeah, you try just for simplicity's sake like i've tried to set up like a You e commerce event tracking myself. And that was complicated. I know I had to like actually write JavaScript to make it work and it was not recommended. So use the out of the box solution. If you can't, [00:08:30] what does that mean?

[00:08:32] Out of so for instance let's give an example. I use teachable. Or as my teaching thing, and it has a, I can go through a checkout, right? So if I was going to use tag manager, because it gives me more clarity into what's going on through the whole process from, landing on the website to purchase.

[00:08:56] How would I Do that like how would I add [00:09:00] tag manager you think or what would I be looking at? In a situation like that I would actually use their inbuilt if they say hey put in your Google Analytics if there's any sort of e commerce Functionality because it to set it up with tag manager where it is going to be a lot of headache for you because it's very complicated.

[00:09:19] You have to set up event listeners and things like that. And it's, would you would you set up, so why, so you wouldn't use tag manager is what you're saying? Cause you said put in the Google [00:09:30] analytics code. Yeah, so I would separate out the Google analytics from the tag manager. In that case, you could still use tag manager for other like the linkedin or any of these other ones that you might be using other marketing platforms that and that you're doing ads through I would use Tag Manager for those ones because they're really good use case.

[00:09:49] It's just the specific e commerce interaction with Google Analytics is going to be better handled by their systems natively, if they've got that integration. So [00:10:00] would you set up Tag Manager for Shopify? Yes. Cause we, we do that for Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar. That's how I add that to the website.

[00:10:09] And so I, you, I, Oh, so you still add Tag Manager and then you put in other codes besides Google Analytics. Is that what you're saying? Or e commerce. I would separate them out because the e commerce tracking is going to be better done natively than what you would be doing through Tag Manager. Because it's just not [00:10:30] You're going to have much easier time overall with what they natively give you.

[00:10:33] Like I said, you can do it, but the way Tag Manager works is it's, it'll be a lot more headache than it's worth for you to. Do you think it's more important than ever to start to understand how to use Tag Manager as a business owner? Or is it more important and easier just to hire somebody to set it up for you?

[00:10:54] I think it depends on a couple of factors on the per, for the person. So I think I don't know what's [00:11:00] happened. I'm frozen. Yeah.

[00:11:03] Hello, everybody. I'm here. Strange. Hi. Oh, there's a question. Damn. I wish my camera was working. I'm going to turn my camera off and just ask you questions. I think Phelan. Cause it's good. Yeah. Yeah. So Steven's asking what are the best practices for managing complex Google Tag Manager setups with many tags and many triggers?

[00:11:23] So there's a variety of things you could do. It also depends on your team because there's different permissions. [00:11:30] So you could actually have a junior person set things up, but they don't have the permissions to actually hit publish. And what you could do is have like your junior junior marketing people set up the tags and then they are unable to publish until the, the admin approves it.

[00:11:45] I feel like I look like I'm ill. The choices are endless. The choices are endless. Ah, okay. We're just gonna there you go. So Okay, that's, I don't like that one. Okay, so the other thing to keep in [00:12:00] mind is you can also have a version history. So one good thing that they had that they took from the coding community is you can see each version of the tag manager setup.

[00:12:09] And so if something breaks, you can go back and be like, Oh, what changed between this one and this one that caused it to break? And so you can both use the version history as well as the approval process to help with any sort of check, checking issues and also figure out where there were changes.

[00:12:25] I do think tag manager can be very [00:12:30] confusing. Stephen saying it makes sense. To the right. Yeah. Junior people. Can get lost. I, I definitely want to defer to a developer when I'm using tag manager if I can, so I can do my specialty. But and as we dig deeper into tag manager, we learn that it's, it is in depth and it's good to have a developer on team that can help.

[00:12:56] Yeah. Yeah, to answer this ties back to the other question we had [00:13:00] before the screen got frozen about was it, would it be recommended to do it? I think that it is more, I think the, for me, it's a function of how tech savvy the business owner is. If they're a little bit, like they can, they're comfortable getting around their WordPress website and comfortable with adding stuff to the head code to begin with I think that's that would be a good spot for someone to be To learn more about tech manager how they could do it Especially if they're doing their own marketing and they have [00:13:30] a pretty good idea on like how to use It's definitely not for beginners.

[00:13:33] I would count it as like an intermediate to and It's intermediate to start and then it leads all the way to you can be super advanced with it. But it's really exciting. It is really exciting. Like we have a client and they, they don't sell direct to the customer. And so we have to figure out a way to track what we're going to consider a conversion.

[00:13:57] So a primary action that we, a key event that we want to [00:14:00] monitor for a sale. And then. Also monitor a secondary action that are people taking the secondary action and I think that gives just so much more data on a not individual level at all, but as a group of what people do. So yeah.

[00:14:18] I would say that actually is a really good example of what are the cool things you could do with tag manager. So we have a Google analytics event, meaning like it gets sent as an event and it has all these parameters. One of the [00:14:30] parameters that we wanted to track was so they have multiple retailers that they work with.

[00:14:34] So we needed to track if they go and find those retailers and we send traffic to their website, we would need her to identify the dynamically their URL. Say they click on Bob's burgers versus Joey's hot dogs. We wanted to track each one of those URLs separately, but still have the event called external link.

[00:14:55] And so that's something you could do by having an additional parameter to that event, which is [00:15:00] the URL. And then we just dynamically is what, what was clicked on. We want to know that URL that was clicked on and we can do that with tech manager. And so with a little bit of extra knowledge there it means that we can help our client show to all the retailers, Hey, I sent you 20 people last week to your website.

[00:15:19] And so that's, I'm nodding.

[00:15:21] So that's a way that we can really dynamically. So we're not having to track each individual URL. We could just say anytime that this URL is not [00:15:30] of the website, but it's going external. I want to know what that one is. And so we can swap that over. And so it's just a little snippet that we do in Google tag manager.

[00:15:39] And then that means that we. Saved ourselves a ton of time and a ton of work. And so let me ask, so when we, can we use tag manager? Can we put tags in from TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter and like our, do we have to be advertisers to put those tags in? And should we put [00:16:00] those tags in?

[00:16:01] Do, does everybody have a tag? You mentioned Microsoft Clarity. Can you expand on that? Yeah. So there's there's. An absolute ton of natively built in because there might be certain parameters for, certain people's tags where you got to put in I don't know, like a API key and and the name of your account.

[00:16:20] So sometimes they have to build those ones. There's also a whole community tab as well. Then in the top right corner, you'll see that there's like community and people have built their own. To fill in some [00:16:30] of the gaps. The other thing is there's also just a custom HTML, which I use for the Microsoft Clarity.

[00:16:35] So it could be anything. The sky's the limit for you there. Because generally when you add stuff to the head, a head tag, it's usually like some sort of script. And so you just pop it into the custom HTML and just make sure you name it like Microsoft Clarity, wherever. So really you. You're, and why would you add Microsoft?

[00:16:53] So I could do that for any of the socials to try to track something organically. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you could, [00:17:00] yeah. Any of them. The only one I would not do because is the Facebook pixel because of it doesn't, because it would be loading third party. It's very limited. So you wanna make sure that you're doing the conversion.

[00:17:12] API when at all possible with Facebook.

[00:17:16] What does that mean? We should be doing? So you should use say you're on Shopify. They have a native integration with Meta that I would definitely go through there because the way it works is that The pixels limited if it loads in [00:17:30] third party, but if the Facebook pixel loads with the website from the backend that's considered first party.

[00:17:36] And so you're all good. You don't violate any of the privacy policies. Ooh, okay. So what do we do with Facebook? You want to look for something that loads in the conversion API. So native integration like I said, with Shopify, they have one that directly speaks between. Meta and Shopify, and they just work directly through their own API.

[00:17:57] So what could Jabby have? [00:18:00] Would Kajabi have one? And then you would put the Facebook tag in Kajabi and then say Kajabi would be able to do help us with retargeting. Cause if we do it like that. Oh, and yeah. And so I'm assuming like teachable would be the same or what does one of our clients use?

[00:18:20] It's really interesting. Helps graduates. Oh yeah. So they have a acuity is like for booking. [00:18:30] That's one of their big ones. Yeah. Yeah, it's Acuity. Do they, so what do you think you'd do with that? Is that the same example? Yeah, you would, you'd look for it in their integrations tab or apps tab.

[00:18:42] They usually have some sort of track with Facebook pixel. And so I would go that route. Most of the other ones they, most of the other marketing platforms don't need this because there's just been a lot of issues between meta and all these other operating systems where they don't let them do as much as they used to do.

[00:18:58] So that's the only reason why I single out [00:19:00] meta and Facebook for that. Interesting. Okay. And that makes a lot of sense. And we've seen that change with our Facebook group, for instance, I'm frozen, but also they've changed it. So we can't go live into groups the way we used to. So we might be changing a little bit of what we're doing and how we're sharing into the group in the next little while in the Facebook group, it looks like LinkedIn is working well.

[00:19:23] So that's brilliant. And I think our Facebook business page is working well too. But so [00:19:30] why would you, okay. So you say it's a no code solution. I guess it is a no code solution. But why would you recommend tag manager to your customers or to other marketers? A lot of it stems around. Once it is set up, it's very easy for any person to jump in there and just add tags.

[00:19:52] They don't really it's on. Someone just shows them once it should be. And you have a recording to work off of. It's actually fairly easy. And [00:20:00] I'm. Pretty sure that just about anyone could do it if they're like a little bit. If they're a slightly tech savvy, you know that they would just need to go and add a new tag Add a find out if there's one that's already native one or use the custom html add it Let's say fire on all pages and then publish.

[00:20:16] It's relatively so it's easy to get Set up and easy you might need a little bit of help to get set up if you're not super comfortable But generally once you're, once it's installed, you're pretty much off to the [00:20:30] races. Okay. I am excited about digging into Tag Manager, and I think more into Tag Manager, and I think you've made it so I don't feel as scared about it, and I know I'm gonna jump in there. Now, can I easily break stuff?

[00:20:46] That was a yes. That was a yes. No, if, no, what I would say is it's just not, you can break things, but the good part about it is like I mentioned earlier, you have version history. So if you do publish something and it does break it, you can go back and [00:21:00] it used to work a week ago, go back to that version and then just restore that one.

[00:21:04] Okay. And if I play around, will I get better at it? And then I won't be as fearful. Cause I think maybe some of the fear is just the way of the movements of the screens and stuff. Maybe it's just something we're not used to. It also has a nice preview tool. So you can see preview your website and it'll open up a tab that'll have the tag assistance, which is a Chrome extension that they could either download And so what that does help you with is that you see what tags [00:21:30] fired, what tags didn't fire.

[00:21:31] It's it's pretty easy to debug and be like the tag I thought was going to fire didn't fire. So now you need to go back to the conditions on which you thought it was going to fire and figure out why it didn't. So it's got a lot of debugging tools that are really helpful. It's also doesn't It doesn't, it isn't live until you publish it.

[00:21:48] So it's not, you can play around and have it in a little sandbox, but it's not going to get out into the real world until you tell it to. Ah, okay. Okay. So yeah, I'm excited about Tag Manager. I [00:22:00] think, and we're also teaching we're having a workshop, aren't we, next week about Tag Manager? Is it free?

[00:22:05] We're going to have a workshop. It's going to be free. It will be on our YouTube and LinkedIn. And yeah, it's going to be free. And so it'll be about going over the actual mechanics of setting this stuff up, and so you guys will get to see how I kind of work through the creating a new event tag, and how to debug what's going on or why it didn't work.

[00:22:26] Awesome. That sounds fun. I will join you, and it sounds like I could open up my [00:22:30] own tag manager and try stuff. On that call and maybe ask questions when I'm doing that. So join us on LinkedIn or YouTube next week. And the reason we're using those channels is because it's just better teaching environments we find than the Facebook live, especially because there seems to be a lot of changes with Facebook.

[00:22:49] So join us over there. And next week, if you can't we're doing another thing too. We're doing Geeks Week again, because we do it every Thursday. At 11 the tag [00:23:00] manager class is on the 21st, so it's on a Tuesday at, I believe 1230 for half an hour. So I am sorry about my screen, but on Thursday we're doing geek speak.

[00:23:11] So join us here again and I think it is what in the world, in the month of marketing, and we're talking about search, social and websites and AI and what what's happening in those industries. Yes, we're right on time. We get to go. And you can see my face move now. [00:23:30] Okay. I'll see you guys next time.

[00:23:33] Bye. Bye.