Let’s start with a little history, Google Tag Manager (GTM) was designed to allow marketing people to easily manage measurement tags for Google Analytics, Google Adwords and more, and to remove the need for a developer to add tags and code to the website.

“With Google Tag Manager, marketers will be able to add, edit or remove marketing and measurement tags without the intervention of webmasters. This will speed the process from the marketing perspective and will free webmasters to work on other important tasks.” – Google

Well…that statement is mostly true. GTM is a great resource for adding analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing tags and more to your site. A marketing person can create, test and publish tags to the site without a developer…most of the time. It is still necessary to keep a good relationship with your developer(s), you will need them, just not as much as before.

Just for clarity reasons, a tag is a bit of code that allows you to measure traffic and visitor behavior and understand if you’re online and social marketing strategies are working.

Why Should I Change To GTM Or Any Other Tag Management System (TMS)?

One of the biggest reasons is less dependence on a developer or development team. Very few companies have a developer sitting by their computer tapping their fingers just waiting for the marketing team to send them a request. Most of the time you have to submit the request, wait for them to acknowledge the request, then it gets added to someone’s schedule, hopefully this happens in a short period of time, most of the time that not the case. Some companies get weekly or even monthly updates. Think of the lost opportunities for lead generation and/or possible sales that you could be losing. With a TMS, you can add, update, and deploy tags with just a few clicks. This will allow you to better manage your marketing strategies without bogging your website down with extra code on the physical site. The more tags that are actually coded into the site the more chances you take of the site being bogged down, redundant and incorrectly applied tags can distort or even account for lost data.

A TMS allows you to test your tags prior to deploying them, that way you can see if you “break” your website before you actually do. GTM has a Preview Mode and will also automatically do error checking that helps with tags that aren’t properly formatted. It also has a Version history so if something does go awry, you can just roll back to a previous version and things are back to normal. GTM has a feature that most IT/Developer teams like, the ability to grant different levels of access with its User-Permission Controls.

Classic To Universal Analytics Migration

Another good reason to change to a TMS is now that Google has upgraded from their Classic Analytics to the new Universal Analytics, they were nice enough to change the code that was used for “onclick” goals it used to be “onclick=”gaq-push” and now it uses “onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’)”blah blah blah, well what Google didn’t take into consideration prior to pushing everyone to the newest latest and greatest Universal Analytics is all your onclick goals are going to break causing many hours of code updates to get them working again and sometimes days if not weeks of lost data, if you have a large amount of tags this could really add up. Well, if you were thinking of going to a TMS, now would be the time! If you are going to go through the time consuming task of updating all the code on your site why wouldn’t you move to TMS that will be a sustainable and scalable solution for site tagging while cutting down the physical code on your website helping with performance.

Hopefully this has peaked your interest and/or answered some of your questions about changing to a TMS. If so, now would be a good time to do more research into which system fits your needs and discuss with your developers/IT Department what would be involved in deploying the TMS.