Google Tag Manager – Making Life Easier For SEO’s

How many of you have Google Analytics installed? What about Adwords Conversion tracking? Re-marketing? A/B Testing? Other analytics software?

It’s easy for your site to get bogged down by copious amounts of different “code snippets” for different tools and/or software and on top of that it is making your website appear slack, irresponsive and downright slow!

Google recognised this problem and came with a solution, recently launching Google Tag Manager.

The Google Tag Manager is a solution that allows you to manage all your code snippets in one place and you create rules as to which pages should “fire” which code snippets and the rest is handled by the Google Tag Manager.

How does it work?

Firstly, you’re required to sign up for a Google Tag Manager account, which can be done using the same account used for Google Analytics, Google Adwords etc.

Once you’ve signed up for a Google Tag Manager account a small piece of code is then produced which is required to be installed on your site, which makes an asynchronous request for the Google Tag Manager GTM.JS file.

This code communicates with your Google Tag Manager account where all your code snippets are stored and their rules are defined. At this stage, Google Tag Manager supports most tags around and offers a debug console, so you can check which code parts are working or not and tweak right from your account.

For example: A web page on your website loads, which triggers the request for GTM.js to check the Tag Manager account to see if it should be firing any of the code snippets, in this case it finds the Google Analytics code and the rule which tells it to fire on every page, and thus fires the snippet of code resulting in the visit being recorded in your Google Analytics Account.

Why should I use it?

As explained earlier, with the installation of this one simple snippet (which loads asynchronously i.e. sequentially) you can add unlimited code snippets to your Google Tag Manager account without;

• Having to have each of the code snippets separately on your website and slowing down your page response times
• Having to bother your I.T. or development team each time you need a new code added, amended or removed.
• Having to debug your code AFTER publishing the code on your website and then having to go back and change it
• Having to pay for this solution

For a full list of its features, visit http://www.google.com/tagmanager/features.html

Conclusion:

With the large number of software, tracking and script options available for your site it’s easy to bog down your code with all these extra chunks. Google Tag Manager provides an easy, manageable solution to store all these code chunks externally and have only one request made to find out which of your code snippets should be firing.

All in all, not only will it make your code less cluttered it will definitely speed up your website response times.