Measuring Google Tag Manager within WordPress

Nowadays, online consumers want to be able to use the internet more and more easily. Google is doing everything it can to improve this online way and make the internet more user-friendly. However, a lot of data is needed from the online behavior of users to determine where bottlenecks or obstacles are. Google has developed various tools or programs for this in recent years. A well-known program for analyzing the actions and behavior of your website visitors is Google Analytics. But maybe you’ve also heard of Google Tag Manager (GTM)? A program from Google that goes a bit further than Google Analytics and can be very interesting for your website or webshop!

Read below what Google Tag Manager is, how it differs from Google Analytics and how you can easily install and implement Google Tag Manager via your WordPress website or webshop.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is also a free tool that enables you to measure user behavior and/or actions on your website or webshop. This data is forwarded and displayed in Google Analytics to show what is happening on your website or webshop. More about what Google Tag Manager can measure later. First, let us explain how GTM works exactly.

Google Tag Manager makes it possible to manage and deploy tags or pixels on your website/webshop. A tag or pixel is a piece of code that can be placed on the backend of a web page. GTM already has a standard number of tags (for example from Google Analytics or Google Ads) which can be placed in the backend with a few clicks. Now that we know what a tag or pixel is, what does its piece of code mean?

A tag or pixel is, therefore, a piece of code in the backend of a web page that can measure behavior or an action of users when they are active on your website or webshop. This behavior and the actions of a user can be formulated very specifically by means of tags. For example, tags can measure on a web page how often a user clicks a certain button, whether they watch a video, whether they fill out contact forms and which products they put in their shopping cart. For example, there are a lot of user actions that can be measured on your website or webshop via tags from Google Tag Manager.

The difference between Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (GTM).

As mentioned above, Google Tag Manager is actually a program that measures user behavior and actions on your website/webshop. But Google Analytics also measures the behavior of your website visitors, right? So how does GTM differ from Google Analytics?

Google Analytics sees if someone is on a page and when the visitor goes to the next page. This is short-sighted, but that’s basically what it comes down to. However, on such a page visitors do a lot more and you also want to make this data transparent. Google Tag Manager offers you these possibilities and you can go very deep into details. This extra data gives you much more insights to optimize your website or webshop and relevant pages for the consumer.

You can also set up the standard actions that you can measure in Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager. So as mentioned above, Google Analytics uses Google Tag Manager to record simple actions about your website visitors and to give a concise overview. In addition, Google Tag Manager gives you the opportunity to measure much more specific actions of your website visitors. In other words, in addition to the simple actions that Google Analytics uses from Google Tag Manager, you can use GTM much more deeply to generate much more data for your analysis. At Convident, we often use tags within GTM to measure user conversions, which are very interesting to measure how website visitors appreciate your web page.

Let’s say you’re running a Google Ads campaign and you want to know how it affects the different number of products you sell. Then it is easy to add a Google Ads tag via Google Tag Manager that can measure whether a user came to your webshop via your Google Ads and which product he / she subsequently purchased. Very interesting to be able to see whether your Google Ads campaigns are working and which products are doing well or less well. Other standard Google Tag Manager tags answer the following questions:

  • How far do users scroll on my page?
  • How many users have filled in the contact form?
  • How many users have requested a callback?
  • Did users play the video? How long? Do they pause? Do they stop the video pretty quickly or watch it in full?
  • At a webshop: What products have users added to their cart? What color and price of products have been added by users?
  • Etc.

How do you implement your GTM within WordPress?

As mentioned above, there are several default tags to use in Google Tag Manager. When using, for example, a standard tag for measuring the number of product purchases on your web page, this can be easily activated in GTM. You can easily create a tag that measures this conversion, and GTM itself ensures that the tag or pixel is placed in the backend of the relevant web page. If the tag has been placed by GTM, its data will be forwarded to Google Analytics, which makes it transparent for you.

But if you want to place more extensive tags to measure more specific conversions on your web page, an extra step is needed. Especially when you want to measure the value of a purchase, the next step is essential. In particular, tags or pixels that measure conversions related to Google Ads campaigns or at all measure conversions within webshops, installing the Google Tag Manager plugin for WordPress is necessary. By installing GTM in your WordPress, the code or pixel can be easily placed by GTM in the backend. So if you want to measure a certain conversion, you can indicate the condition of the tag via Google Tag Manager. Then Google Tag Manager through the plugin ensures that the tag or pixel is placed in the backend of a web page or multiple designated web pages.

Do you also want more insight into the behavior of your users and/or the conversions that are performed on your website or webshop? Start now with Google Tag Manager and understand your target group better. Would you like more information or help implementing your Google Tag Manager tags with WordPress or the combination of tags with your Google Ads campaign? Feel free to contact us or visit the Convident office for a no-obligation conversation!

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