Google Making Tag Manager Less Necessary is a Good Thing
For 12 years, marketers have needed to use Google Tag Manager (GTM) with Google Analytics (GA) in order to customize the GA Events report
If you’re new to website analytics, events are the actions that visitors take on your website — everything from page views and scrolls to clicks and file downloads.
An example of “before GTM and after” is the click event. By default in GA — with no customization needed by a marketer — the Events report will tell you how many clicks your website got over a given period.
This is helpful data, but what’s even more helpful is knowing which website calls to action (CTAs) got clicks, and how different CTAs perform. With GTM’s launch in 2012, marketers gained the ability to customize the GA Events report to fulfill this granular data need — for click events and all other types of events.
But the times, they are a-changin’
In my website conversion tracking work for marketing agencies and fractional CMOs, I noticed in Q2 this year that the current version of GA, known as GA4, updated the Events section to include event configuration options. IMO, the biggest result of this change, which Google is still rolling out, is that many marketers will no longer need to use two apps (GTM with GA) in order to customize the GA Events report to fit their strategy and campaign deployment needs. (And really, it means simplification from three apps to just one, because marketers also needed to use Tag Assistant, which is part of GTM, along with browser tabs for GTM and GA.)
Why this is a welcome change for marketing agencies and fractional CMOs
A reply to my email to a fractional CMO contact announcing my Packages page, which includes a GA4 + Tag Manager setup option for agency and fCMO clients.
I work mainly with marketing agencies and fCMO businesses. A big driver of why my contacts in these companies founded or joined their firm is because they are creatives who love to create things.
Therefore, spending time in not just one browser tab for GA4, but three including GTM and Tag Assistant, isn’t just viewed as a time suck by these (generally more) right-brained folks — it often produces headaches because the three apps require sustained left-brain thinking that they don’t use in many of their other tasks for clients.
With GA4 now eschewing GTM and Tag Assistant for many forms of event customization, it means a lot less time spent in apps, translating to fewer hours for clients on retainer. And for clients who are billed by the hour, fewer hours for analytics tasks can improve client satisfaction, leading to longer engagements and greater client lifetime value.
So when do you need to turn to Tag Manager for event customization?
While GTM is less necessary now than it was in the past, there are still use cases for it. Here are two big ones:
When you want to verify that an event tag fired in real time. If you set up an event just in GA4, you’ll need to wait 24 hours before you can verify that testing it results in the corresponding event being captured in the GA4 Events report. But if you use GTM and Tag Assistant with GA4’s DebugView, you can verify in real time whether a tested event tag is firing or not — with a successful tag firing corresponding to that event being recorded in your GA4 Events report 24 hours later.
When the website coding for a click call to action is customized beyond what can be set for an event in GA4. Often, beyond GA4 and GTM, marketers need to simultaneously work in a client website platform to customize the website code for a click (or other event type) CTA in order to get it to work with the other two apps to verify a successful event firing. With a click event, for example, there are parts of the click Element that need to be recognized by GA4 for the click to show in the GA4 Events report, and this can vary depending on how the website is coded. Continued use of GTM and Tag Assistant with GA4’s DebugView allows marketers to test and retest in the client’s website platform, and to confirm in real time when an event successfully fires.
Regardless of how you customize the GA4 Events report, the data captured impacts business decision making and growth
A business looking to do anything in GA4 ultimately wants to know how the tool can inform business decisions and impact strategy and growth.
This is the major reason that I love working with marketing agencies and fCMOs. I recently posted a case study for my client Worldly Strategies. In the Outcome section, I noted how my client’s client — a leadership development company — benefitted from the conversion event tracking I set up for them by uncovering a new, lucrative audience segment, as well as improving their ability to assess team member performance at the top of the client’s marketing funnel.
If you’re looking for the “easy” button to start tracking conversions from the top calls to action on your website, so you can make more informed marketing strategy and budget decisions, let’s talk.
