Who is on your website and what are they doing there? What types of web traffic are you driving? If you're a marketer, these are burning questions you probably ask yourself frequently. You've probably already gone to great lengths to figure out how to monitor this activity. There are a number of ways you can do this, most of which likely include late nights and long hours with your web developer implementing endless code on your site in hopes that the ROI was worth it. Isn't there an easier way? Discover Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. These two free tools will allow you to keep tabs on all your site activity and ultimately answer the questions about your web presence that you spend countless hours pondering. Google Tag Manager in a nutshell Google Tag Manager is a place for all the marketing tags you want to deploy on your website. These help tell the story of what happens when someone visits your page. Tag Manager keeps your tags (or JavaScript code snippets) in one central location.

So when you're ready to employee email database trigger them on your site, you can do it in an orderly fashion. Before GTM, the solution would have hired a developer to customize your entire site with the JavaScript snippets it needed. It also meant that you would have thousands of lines of code to load at once once the developer's job was done, which could have significantly affected site load times. With GTM, your many tags no longer need to be implemented one by one or swapped out by a developer based on changes in what you want your site to do. You decide when, if and how your beacons fire. In GTM, your tags live in what's called a container. It's basically a catch-all for the different tags you plan to use on a specific site. Your container tags need to know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. This is where triggers and variables come in. A trigger is the action that sets the tag in motion. A variable is like a table of contents that you can choose from to decide what your tag will do and what events will trigger it. Google Analytics and Tag Manager You can use Google Tag Manager to set up a tag that also triggers Google Analytics code on your site.

Google Analytics is a service that allows you to monitor site traffic and activity for any site you manage. It will easily answer all the big questions you have about what is happening on your site. Given the importance of this information, Analytics is very important when it comes to determining what your site visitors are paying attention to. In Analytics, you can set up specific goals and events that you want to track that occur on your site. Simply put, an event is when someone interacts with your page. It can be something as basic as landing on your page and viewing it. Events can also be more in-depth, such as someone clicking a link or performing an action that you want to keep track of. A goal is a kind of measure of how often visitors take actions on your site. The bottom line is that there are a lot of things you probably want to know about your page visitors. The next question is: what do you need to do next to find out?