When you have a website, you have to follow its performance in order to see how the internet users react with your website. There are several tools to do this performance analysis such as Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics for example.
Combined, these two tools will be very useful and will give you wonderful results and a better view on the performance of your site.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a tag management system. Designed by Google and available for free, it allows you to manage your tags, your underlying tags without having to depend on a developer. With Google Tag Manager, you can create and update tags and scripts on all pages of a website quickly and easily.

Google Tag Manager will be very useful if you have a big website or if you plan to have one. We advise you to have it if you have an e-commerce site.

How to configure and install Google Tag Manager?

To install Google Tag Manager, you must follow these steps:

In Tag Manager, click on Accounts then Create an account.

Create an account

Enter the name of the account
Choose your country.
Specify if you want to share data anonymously with Google and third parties
Enter a descriptive container name
Select the type of content: web, AMP, Android or iOS. If you're setting up a mobile container, specify whether you're using the Firebase SDK or one of the older SDKs.
Click Create.
Review the terms of use and click Yes if you agree to them.

When you first load your new container, you will be prompted to install the code snippet from the web container or to take your first steps with Tag Manager as part of the SDK for your chosen mobile platform. You can install your code snippets at this point or click OK to close this dialog box. You can also configure your container first, and install the container snippet or SDK later.

Google Tag Manager installation

You will have created your Tag Manager account. Now you need to create your tags or scripts. The first one we invite you to deploy is Google Analytics.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to measure the traffic on your site. It allows you to know the number of visitors, pages visited, the countries of the visitors, the source of the visit and many other things. It's a pretty powerful tool. Once associated with Google Tag Manager, you will have a better analysis and view on the performance of your site.

How to associate Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager?

The first step to associate Google Analytics with your Tag Manager account, is to create a Google Analytics account.

Now go to your Tag Manager account and click on Add Tag

Add Tag Manager tag

Enter a name for your tag.
Click on the tag configuration area, and choose "Google Analytics - Universal Analytics"
Leave "Tracking Type" set to "Page View".
Create a new Google Analytics Settings variable
Enter the tracking ID of your Google Analytics account (UA-XXXXX-X)
Save the variable
Now click on "Trigger".
Choose
Save the tag. You will be redirected to the home page where you can see the changes you made and your new tag.
Press "Submit" at the top right
Create your first version by entering the version name and description.
Then click on "Publish".
That's it. You have just associated your Google Analytics with the Tag Manager. Your Google Tag Manager account will now collect, process and send the data to Google Analytics which will in turn configure, store and report them.

For all services concerning websites, digital marketing and branding, call on our web agency.