Google Tag Manager How-To Series Part 1
So what is Google Tag Manager? Google Tag Manager is a tool that allows you to organize and maintain all of your tracking scripts in one place without having to edit the code of your website. I’m going to quickly show you how to set up a Google Tag Manager account and add your Universal Analytics tracking script to it.
This is the first video in our Google Tag Manager How-To Series.
Step 1: Setup Account
- Go to https://tagmanager.google.com and create an account.
- Name your container and select “Web” for where to use the container.
- Click “Create”.
- Copy both parts of the Google Tag Manager snippet and add it to every page of your site in the recommended locations. You will only need to update your site once with these two snippets and then you will be able to manage all of your tracking scripts through the Google Tag Manager interface.
- Visit Google’s quick start guide for more detailed instructions on this.
Step 2: Adding Universal Analytics Tag
- In the left hand sidebar there are three main links: “Tags”, “Triggers”, and “Variables”. We’re going to use all three of these when adding the Universal Analytics tag.
- Click “Tag”, then “New” and name the tag “Universal Analytics”.
- Under “Tag Configuration” select “Google Analytics – Universal Analytics.” Google has included many prebuilt options like Google Analytics and Google Ads Conversion Tracking, but they have also included preconfigured tags for other services, like CrazyEgg. These are all prebuilt so you don’t have to worry about maintaining the tracking script if Google decides to update their Universal Analytics script. Google Tag Manager will automatically take that change into account.
- Once you have selected the Google Analytics tag, click “Google Analytics Settings” and create a new variable for your Google Analytics account UA number. The reason you create a variable for this is so you can be sure your UA number is the same across all Analytics tags as you create more.
- Now we have to choose which pages this tag will show on, which is under “triggering”. Since this is Google Analytics we want this tag to fire on every page of the site, so click “Triggering” and then select “All Pages.”
- Click “Save”.
Step 3: Launch
- So now that we’ve setup the tag and we have it configured with our UA number variable and we’ve chosen to have the tag trigger on all pages, if we want this to go live on our site right now just click “Submit” in the upper right.
- Add a descriptive version name so that you know what this change was for.
- Click “Publish” and it’s live.
So this was just a very basic quick tutorial of how to set up Google Analytics in Google Tag Manager. The biggest advantage of using Google Tag Manager is the organization. Once you have this set up you will be able to organize and manage all of your tracking scripts from the Tag Manager interface without having to make any changes to the code of your website.
In the next video, I’ll go over how to set up Google Analytics event tracking in Google Tag Manager.
For your reference, here are the other blogs in this series:
Part Two – Google Tag Manager How-To Series Part 2
Part Three – Google Tag Manager How-To Series Part 3