Google Tag Manager Tutorial #1: The Interface and creating our first tag!

It's been a long time since I have written something here. I wanted to revive this blog for a long time and today is the day! If you are new here, don't mind! Let's dive into the topic. I have written an article on the basics of Tag Management System quite a long time ago. If you are new to Tag Management and are in the Digital Analytics industry, do read the above article before proceeding to get a basic understanding. This will be a series of articles which is completely dedicated towards Google Tag Manager (GTM), a free tag management tool provided by Google. You do not need any prerequisites of programming but should be able to understand the basics of Digital analytics tracking. We will cover various aspects of complex tracking and programming as we go through the tutorials.

High-level working of GTM

In this first tutorial, let us understand how GTM works on a high level and get an overview of the interface and publish our first Google Analytics Tag.

Usage of Google Tag Manager on the Web

It's always interesting to know how many people are using a technology, isn't it? Yes, it is. Even though I have been using different Tag Management systems from a quiet an amount of time, I am really not sure how many people/businesses are using a particular Tag Management solution.
I have been searching about this on the internet and came to know about a cool website called builtwith.com which is exactly what I was looking for. It gives out the number of websites which uses a particular technology. So as for the Google Tag Manger goes check out the below infographic which show cases the number of Top 10K, 100K and Million websites which uses Google Tag Manager and the trend over the time.

Surely, Google Tag Manager is being adopted quickly and as expected the 3rd tier of websites are the quickest to adopt it. Tier one websites are slowly making the transition to GTM. It can be due to the presence of Enterprise level Tag Management solutions like Ensighten, Tealium etc.

The builtwith website also gives an approximate number of total websites on web which use Google Tag Manager. It comes around 616,000+ which is huge but a long way to go though.

Usage of Google Tag Manager | Create Infographics

Source: http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/Google-Tag-Manager

What are the features missing in Ensighten Manage 2.0 that can make tagging much peaceful?

Ensighten as I have written in my previous blog post Ensighten The most robust Tag Management tool has some great features which takes the tagging experience to next level. In this post I would like to post some features which if present can help and make the tagging process much more peaceful.

1. Versioning for Conditions
Though the present Conditions tab with all the awesome features to generate Regex is cool in creating a new condition I recently had a situation where I kept on changing the condition and after sometime I thought I would stick to the original logic which has been there already but I was pretty lazy to keep track of what the logic was at the beginning and finally I ended up wasting good amount of time what I have written. There can be other situations where the account has more than one user and if one of the user modifies the condition and messes up and he/she doesn't remember what the original logic was, it will be really cool to switch back to the previous state.

Ensighten: The most robust Tag Management tool

Note: The views of the present post are solely mine and not my employer's.

A while ago I have written a post on Tealium and how is it different when I was little new to Tag Management and found some of it's features useful to beginners who are not well versed with JavaScript. I have been using Ensighten since a good amount of time and I am in love with the tool, its robustness in deploying tags and the way the tool works. With the advent of Manage 2.0 (the second version of Ensighten Console) the tool became way cooler than ever, more robust, modern and lot quicker.

So, in this post I would like to tell you what are the features that make Ensighten stand apart in the market and how it makes your life peaceful while tagging. Most of the features I will talk in this post will be about Manage 2.0. Since I do not have access to Ensighten tool for my personal use, I wouldn't be able to provide screenshots.

Way Ensighten Works:
Ensighten works on a very simple concept "Deploy the required tag on to a desired page". So if you want to deploy Google Analytics to your website, you will be creating a tag for Google Analytics and tell Ensighten to deploy the tag on all the pages of your website. It's simple, no Nonsense. All you have is your tags and conditions where to deploy the tags.

How to implement Google Universal Analytics using Google Tag Manager (GTM) on your Blog or Website?

So, you have decided to track your website or blog (blog in my case) and started to searching for free web analytics tools and found that none other than Google provides one. Now you are under confusion that Google has two versions of analytics namely Classic Analytics and Universal Analytics. Don't be confused, go ahead and implement Universal Analytics. Of course the advantages are many which will take another post to talk about it.

Now that you have decided to use Universal Analytics on your blog, how do you implement it? Not the traditional way but the newer one using Tag Management tool. Again none other than Google's Tag Manager! (Read: Understand the Basics of Tag Management System).

In this post, I would like to explain you step by step process on how to implement Universal Analytics using Google Tag Manager (GTM) on your blog.

How Tealium is different from other Tag Management tools?

The present buzz in Web Analytics industry is Tag Management (Don't know why? Read the basics of Tag Management System). Recently I compared three free tag management tools, Google Tag Manager, Qubit Open Tag and DC Storm Tag Manager. All of the above tools are either free or free up to certain extent depending upon the number of page views the tags has been served. But there are separate set of Premium tools such as Ensighten, Bright Tag, Tealium and others which are being used by most of the Enterprise Clients. All these premium tools have been present in the market for quiet a good bit of time and each of them is trying to become the market leader with their features.

Fortunately I have had a chance to work with Tealium. I would like to specially write about Tealium because of it's awesome features which make it a special tool in the market.

So what makes Tealium unique and different from other Tag Management tools in the market? Let's take a dive in to the various features and how they affect your implementation capability. Before reading further I just wanted to convey that all the opinions in the present post are purely based on my experience with the various tools.

Comparison of 3 Best Free Tag Managers: Google Tag Manager, Qubit Open Tag, and DC Storm Tag Manager

(Scores are updated on 27th November 2013)

Hello everyone, in my previous posts I reported about the Tag Management Usage among Top Retailers on Internet. For an enterprise level customer, there are outstanding premium TMS tools like Tealium, Ensighten, Bright Tag and others but for small tier customers who does not want to spend a lot of money on TMS solution, fortunately there are good TMS tools which provide a good service for free of cost.

The buzz around Google Tag Manager clouded some brilliant TMS tools which provide Free tier in the market. During a conversation on Web Analytics Yahoo group I came to know about those Tag Management tools which are freely available as Google Tag Manager and have lot of other features. Those two important tools are DC Storm Tag Manager and Qubit Open Tag. Both provide Free tier along with an option for Premium upgrade.

In this post, I would like to compare all these three TMS tools and analyze which of them is best. Of course, the choice of tool depends upon your requirement but I will do a functional analysis of all the tools. The following analysis is based up on purely my experience with the tools, this might vary with your experiences.

A report on Tag Management System in Top 100 Internet Retailers

In the previous post, I have talked about the basics of Tag Management System, so most of you would be interested to know about how the Market is receiving TMS solution and how effectively are they using the solution. Fortunately, Lima Consulting Group and well know Tag audit firm (I will talk about Tag Audit Tools in future) Observe Point did a research on Top 100 Retail companies on Internet and about the Web Analytics solutions they are following and came up with a very good report which gives you a snapshot of the Industry's awareness on the TMS tools.

I would like to present you the highlights of the report. These highlights will answer most of the questions you will be having on the present industry's maturity levels in web analytics.

Understanding the Basics of Tag Management System

If you meet someone from the Web Analytics industry or if you are keeping yourself updated about the industry, you will be hearing a lot about Tag Management System (TMS for short) these days. So what exactly TMS mean? Let us take a dive into this subject matter and understand the different questions.

What is Web Analytics?
If you are a beginner and new to Web Analytics, Web Analytics is nothing but a method of studying the online traffic, visitor behavior and coming up with an actionable insight which will be useful in decision making. So, to study the online traffic we use different tools which collect the data from websites and showcase in a nice Interface with various features. Some of the examples for such tools are Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, IBM CoreMetrics, WebTrends, Piwik and others. Most of these tools use JavaScript tags placed on the website to collect data. We have other kind of tools which perform log analysis. To know more about the history of Web Analytics, I would suggest you to read the Wiki of Web Analytics.

Let's continue with our understanding of Tag Management System.