Google Tag Manager 360 – Webinar Q&A and Recap

In the latest event in our Google Analytics 360 webinar series, Tag Manager 360 product manager, Scott Herman, joined me for an engaging session on Google’s powerful  platform for effectively tracking and accelerating campaigns. Faster campaign deployment and improved site performance are just a couple of reasons that advanced marketers are adopting tag management systems in droves. Google Tag Manager 360’s native integrations, seamless collaboration and valuable support are some other compelling advantages.

If you couldn’t attend the webinar, view the webcast recording and check out the session Q&A below to see what you missed.

If you have Google Analytics 360, do you automatically have Tag Manager 360 or do you need to sign up for it separately?
If you are a Google Analytics 360 customer, you automatically have the ability to get Tag Manager 360 for free. However, you do need to ensure that your tag manager containers are linked to the 360 Suite home site, and that they are enabled on 360.

If you need help with doing that and you purchased the platform through a reseller, contact your reseller for support. If you purchased through Google, you can contact the Google team directly. Typically, when Cardinal Path is activating clients on Google Analytics 360 and know that they have Google Tag Manager, we will also ensure that we’re enabling those containers on Tag Manager 360. We want to ensure that clients have immediate access to the SLAs as well as other features that are available within the 360 version.

Is it possible to create tags (ie, event tags) for any unique code generated in Variants within Google Optimize? For example, would we have the ability to track a click to a button that only appears on an Optimize Variant page?
When you have Google Tag Manager on the page, it has the ability to interact with any of the page-level variations and also with any buttons that are available on that page. You won’t have to hardcode any of that. So if you do have a button that’s showing up in a particular Variant, you can still create a trigger to ensure that it’s being tagged effectively.

Does Tag Manager require development skills?
It does and it doesn’t. If you want to unlock some of the more advanced features, such as tethering to specific elements, or getting more advanced to surface data on your site, it does help to have development chops when working in Google Tag Manager.

However, that doesn’t mean that the tool isn’t accessible to everyone. There are a lot of things on the page in Google Tag Manager that you can capture very quickly and easily. There are a lot of turnkey solutions available in the product that do make it a lot simpler and accessible.

It almost bridges the gap between the marketing team and the development team in terms of technical skillset.

During a transition from Google Analytics to Google Tag Manager, are there any key recommendations for seamlessly transitioning reporting numbers to stakeholders?
I assume this is about transitioning from an on-page javascript implementation of Google Analytics, to deploying Google Analytics through Tag Manager.

If you’re just transitioning the exact same type of tracking, there may be some very slight changes but generally, you should see the data maintained pretty consistently. However, during the transition to Google Tag Manager, you may consider looking at it as an opportunity to reevaluate how the Google Analytics tracking was implemented and possibly tweak and refine it so that it better meets your business needs.

Updating your implementation of Google Analytics to properly reflect your business needs provides an opportunity to drive more value for your business and drive optimization opportunities. You’ll identify key metrics that better match the goals of your business.

There are a couple options to help you effectively communicate the change in reporting numbers that you might see when you update your implementation.

1. You can select some of the metrics that are going to be implemented consistently across both the historic version and and new version, and you can use those as baselines to ensure that tracking is consistent.

2. One other technique that you could use, is to keep your legacy Google Analytics Web Property tracking while creating a new Web Property for your updated tracking. You can have that tracking set up to whatever suits your needs. You are then able to send data to another property in parallel and run that for a week, a month, however long it takes to be confident that it is tracking correctly and to help you understand the variances you are seeing in your reporting. Once you are comfortable with your new reporting, you can remove the legacy tracking. We often do this when moving from other analytics platforms, but it can also be useful in these conditions as well.

Is there really only one price point for the 360 Suite? I am currently on Adobe Tag Manager and Omniture and need to justify the business decision to transition to Google Tag Manager.
Google Analytics 360 has tiered pricing. The first tier covers up to 500 Million hits per month. If you’d like more information, we’d be happy to talk through what your costs would look like with GA360.

Could you talk a little about a framework or design document that enables amateurs to start working with Google Tag Manager for websites.
At Cardinal Path we have developed what we call a Solution Design Reference or SDR. This document references a KPI framework and outlines all the data points that we want to track in our analytics implementations and is used as a base for our implementation consultants when they work with the website developers to setup a data layer, and when they configure Google Tag Manager. We suggest organizations leverage similar types of documentation for themselves.

If you’re just getting started, we highly recommend going through the Google Tag Manager sessions on Analytics Academy, and reviewing the GTM support pages.

********

We come across myriad scenarios and varying levels of experience in our many client implementations of Google Analytics and Tag Manager. Check out our responses to

10 Google Tag Manager Questions That We Get Asked Most Often.