Google is providing great and free tools for marketing professionals and website owners: Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
More than 27 Million websites are using at Google Analytics, and a bit less little than 4 Million have Google Tag Manager installed.
Do you use Google Analytics? With Google Tag Manager?
Did you know that you can use these two tools for a more sophisticated configuration, such as for example:
- Manage your marketing tags on several versions of your website (Test, Pre-production, Production).
- Test the new features before deploying them on the production website.
- Trigger events from the tag manager without coding
- Define advanced goals and conversion metrics configuration
This tutorial centralizes all the resources needed to properly use Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics.
Or if you prefer, to use Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager.
If you follow the guide step by step, you will have a correct configuration of your favorite marketing tools.
The chapters in this guide cover the following topics:
- How to install and configure Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager
- How to use Google Tag Manager environments for multi-site management
- How to configure Google Analytics across multiple domains with Google Tag Manager
- How to create events and goals with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
If you follow all the steps in this tutorial, you will have at the end :
- Google Tag Manager installed on your site
- Google Analytics installed via the tag manager
- The configuration of your production and test website managed from Google Tag Manager
- A mechanism to test and deploy your tags on different environments
- Google Analytics properly configured for your production, pre-production and test website from one single tag
- A better understanding of the event mechanism of Google Tag Manager
- Google Analytics goals set up together with events triggered by Google Tag Manager
And all this, step by step. It’s all there, you just have to let yourself be guided.
But before starting, do you know the difference between Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics
Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are appropriately named. Google couldn’t have been clearer.
Google Analytics is an analysis tool for websites
With Google Analytics (GA for the pro), you can measure the traffic on your website, know the number of pages visited, where visitors come from. You will get many other metrics and data to analyse with GA.
You can also scan your mobile website or other application, but we won’t go into those details today.
You are certainly one of the millions of people who use Google Analytics to measure the performance of your website. Right?
What is Google Tag Manager? This marketing tool is certainly a little less known and deserves a little more attention.
Google Tag Manager is a marketing tag manager
Google Tag Manager or GTM allows you to manage and centralize your marketing tags and deploy them on your website.
What’s a marketing tag? It’s a piece of code (javascript) that allows you to activate a feature on your website such as :
- Analyze your website traffic with Google Analytics
- Retargeting with Facebook Pixel
- Integration of your marketing automation forms
For these applications to work on your site, you need to insert a small piece of code for each application in your site (and call your IT support to change the HTML code).
With Google Tag Manager, you can easily manage all these tags from one interface without modifying your site. (You just need to have the GTM code snippet installed on your site, we’ll see how to do it later).
Simply put, Google Tag Manager is a big box with all your marketing tags inside.
Can I use Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager
The answer is simple: YES, and I advise you to use both tools together. (And that’s why we’re here).
Google Tag Manager “contains” Google Analytics. Google Analytics will be a tag within Google Tag Manager.
And we will see how to take advantage of both tools.
Steps for advanced configuration of Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
If you follow the next four chapters, you will have a professional configuration of Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.
Install and set up Google Analytics
with Google Tag Manager
After the installation of the tools, we will see how to configure Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics.
Google Tag Manager Environments setup for multi-site management
We will see how to configure your production website, pre-production and test environments from a single Google Tag Manager and leverage the environment and versioning features.
Google Analytics across multiple domains with Google Tag Manager
Let’s take environment management a step further by learning how to set up multiple Google Analytics tracking IDs within a single tag in Google Tag Manager.
Events and Goals with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager
In this article, we will see step by step how to set up events with Google Tag Manager and then create a goal in Google Analytics.