CXL Conversion Optimization Minidegree — Week 8
In Week 8 of CXL’s Conversion Optimization minidegree, we continue learning about Google Tag Manager from Chris Mercer.
Unfortunately, thanks to a very nasty cold that I’m still battling right now, I didn’t get very far this week.
But I did finish Mercer’s GTM course!
Yay?
This 7-hour long course doesn't feel like 7 hours, to be honest. That could be because I’m listening to it at 1.5x speed, but Mercer did a great job explaining (almost) everything you need to know about Google Tag Manager.
Of course, after hearing all about Google Tag Manager in Mercer’s Analytics course, I can already see how powerful a combination of these tools can be.
Surprisingly, this course isn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. I was prepared for another Analytics-style course that’ll make my brain feel like it’s going to melt, but no!
Everything is straightforward this time around. Personally, I think this one should be somewhere before the GA course. It answered plenty of questions that I had about GA when taking the course, particularly about events.
Then again, maybe I feel like the course is easier because I went through the GA course, so…
Let’s just discuss what new glimmer of info I learnt this week, shall we?
Week 8 brings a lot of new insights on Google Tag Manager. This week, we start to actually use the tags, triggers, and variables we defined last week.
Quick refresher:
- Tags: Inform external platforms of what your users are doing on your website. Mark what you want the tag manager to do.
- Triggers: Triggers are responsible for when you want tag managers to send data. There are a few types of triggers — page view, click, engagement, and others.
- Variables: Extra information Google Tag Manager will need to do tasks. For example, a tag that triggers when you play the video. You need to add the variables if you want it to inform you of the details (how far did they get on the video? which video is played?). You can turn new types on, add new variables, and configure them from the ‘Variables’ page.
- Data layer: Data layer is just temporary storage that stores information in term of keys and values.
- Preview mode: TBV method (trust but verify, remember?) of this course. To check if your tags fire, what events happened, and how the data layer looks like before you publish your new version.
One of the best practices when adding tags and variables is to check if there’s a built-in option available first.
Built-in tags and variables are convenient because all you need to do is fill in the blanks and everything will be ready to use.
To create tags, you need a tag configuration, a trigger, and a variable.
In tags, you can add a custom HTML from your vendor if there are no built-in or third-party tags available. Besides adding a new tag, this custom HTML option is also used to push information to the data layer.
A trigger is when you want your tags to fire. You can customize your trigger through the configuration option on the trigger’s page.
For example, when you need only want to measure clicks to certain links, even though you have multiple hyperlinks on your page leading to different addresses.
Of course, both tags and triggers can use variables to specify the customization further.
An instance where you’d want to use a variable is when you need to send something from your data layer to Google Analytics. Once you pick a type of variable, a customization screen will pop up where you can customize what you want the variable to be and in what format.
Now that the very basics are out of the way, let’s talk about the basics. Or how you can start using Google Tag Manager on your website.
There are three things you need to do to get started.
- Create a Google Tag Manager account for your website.
- Put the Google Tag Manager tracking script on the header of your website pages.
You can manually put it in your theme’s header or use a plugin like Google Tag Manager for WordPress (if you’re using WordPress) to do this. Check your website with extensions like the Tag Assistant to make sure your tag is firing. - Create a tag to send your data to your destination.
When sending to Google Analytics Universal, you’ll also need to create a variable with the type ’Google Analytics Settings’ with your GA tracking info in it.
Keep in mind that if you’re using a Google Analytics tracking code before, you need to make sure to take this tracking code off. Otherwise, both the GA tracking code and GTM’s will send signals to your GA account, which will mess up your numbers.
Now that you set up your Google Analytics with Tag Manager, let’s see an example of a specific user behavior you can monitor using Google Tag Manager
One example is your scroll depth. By simply using the scroll depth trigger, you can fire a tag whenever a user reaches a milestone on your page, which you can use to measure engagement rate.
Be warned that in short pages, you should turn the ‘non-interaction hit’ parameter to true. Otherwise, every scroll will turn into an interaction hit and it will affect your bounce rate later on. Which in short pages just isn’t true.
I think that using Google Tag Manager will tremendously help with website analytics. For one, you don’t have to deal with WordPress’ confusing layout every time you want to install a tracking code.
Another area I can see GTM will be very helpful is when combined with Universal Analytics, considering there are so many combinations you can use there.
Not to mention with the development of GA4, which is event-based, I’m sure that there will be many more opportunities to use GTM in the future.
I’m already going through the next course, “User research” led by Megan Kierstead with her fabulous purple hair. But I’d like to end this cycle of half-finished courses right here, so let’s save the discussion on user research for the next post.
Next week, we’ll be talking about user research, heuristic analysis, a google analytics audit, and (hopefully) wrap up the second part of CXL’s Conversion optimization minidegree.
