Top five Google Tag Manager features you should be using in 2020

3 July 2020

In this article, we’d like to present our top 5 GTM and Analytics integrations. GTM is a tag management system (TMS) provided by Google to easily track interactions and pageviews on your website. Analytics is the data processor in which you can analyze your data and get valuable insights on your customers as well as website performance.

Below we will present five important trackings that you can implement with Google Tag Manager and the insights that you can generate with Google Analytics.

1. E-commerce & Enhanced Ecommerce tracking

This implementation is the single important one for all e-commerce businesses and business owners. The integration of e-commerce tracking is a little bit more complex than the other integrations because you have to hand over for e.g. product id’s to dynamically track your product detail pages. Nevertheless, the effort to implement E-commerce tracking is still worth it, because you will get valuable information about all your products and the buying processes within your website. After setting up e-commerce tracking, you will be able to track your revenues, the product add /remove to/from cart interactions, and all the single steps until a purchase is done. These data are the basis of your interpretation and insights generation. Google Analytics provides you automatically an e-commerce funnel and other e-commerce-based analysis. You can also use this data to calculate important KPIs like CLV (customer lifetime value) or use the data to set-up a basket analysis. So, what to do with all of this data and information?

One Insight you can generate with the basic setup is if you identify high churn rates within the purchase process. If you identify for that on the shipping details step there is a very high churn rate, then you should think over redesigning, improving or analyzing this site to gain information why there is a high churn rate and to eliminate the barriers for the customers. This insight will not only improve the buying process for your customers, it will also generate more revenue. If you like to know how an e-commerce set-up looks like in Google Analytics then you can use this link to have a look at the demo account provided by Google (you will need to log in with your Google Account).

2. Scroll Depth tracking

The scroll depth tracking is an implementation that is easy to set up. GTM provides you a predefined trigger for this implementation, so you don’t have to create or implement it yourself. Once you have picked the scroll depth trigger, you need to set up values on which percentages or on which pixels you will fire the event. In the picture above you see that we picked percentages because this gives us a standardized way of analyzing the scrolling events, due to the fact that not every page has the same length. The usage of pixel values could also be a good indicator for the scroll depth, particularly for technical analysis of the pages.

Nevertheless, we will concentrate on the percentages, because we want to generate insights of the scrolling behavior regarding to the usage or consumption of content within the website. The data which you will get out of the scroll depth event, will clearly show you how many of your visitors will scroll through your pages, this information can generate insights about what kind of information you like to present on the top (above the fold), in the middle and what to place at the bottom. The data will enable you to define activities to bring the right content for your users/customers and therefore to decrease your bounce rates and to trigger more conversions within your website.

3. Content Grouping

Content Grouping is a nice way to analyze your website in a broader way. The setup is not very complex but needs to be done in Google Analytics and in GTM. The more complex way is to group your websites into the same group, therefore you have 3 possibilities to group it via tracking code, extraction (regex) and rules. Once you have grouped your websites into the relevant groups you can analyze the specifics of your content groups and get an overview of the performance. For example the bounce rates for your product detail pages are higher in comparison to the other groups, this information could be used to dig deeper into the cause of the high bounce rates and defying appropriate activities to improve the performance of the product detail pages. Read more information about content grouping here.

4. Cross-Domain tracking

The cross-domain tracking is a helpful way if you are using multiple websites and landing pages as strategic points in your marketing strategy. By implementing the same Google Analytics Account or GTM Container in all your websites, you are still not able to track cross-domain behavior. The jumps between the domains will always be handled as a new Visitor and will rather lead to pollution of your data than a reliable source of information. To get rid of this behavior you need to set up cross-domain tracking, so you will be able to transfer the client-id from one website to the another within your environment. I recommend implementing it via GTM because this is for the most users the easier way of setting up cross-domain tracking. After you have implemented cross-domain tracking you will have the right data to identify the performance of your marketing strategy, which you can use to push more specific websites with high performances and take actions for low performing websites

5. Click tracking

Click tracking sounds very clear to all of us when it comes to implement tracking, but click tracking is often not very well interpreted or not included well to analyze websites. The click defines interaction with your content made by a customer and provides clear data. So, if a user /customer makes a click on “add to cart” on your website, they provide you with information about their preferences. A Pageview is also a good source of data but it is not as clear as a click and is harder to interpret due to the fact, that you see only that somebody visited your website, but you don’t know which kind of interaction they made during their visit. The setup is really simple if you use GTM and want to track the interactions with your content. The click-tracking could be implemented on different content types like the navigation, tabs, accordions, button and call to action. All those elements are worth to track, because you can gain valuable insights on the performance of those elements and identify valuable content for your users and how they can lead to generate more conversions.

One example of how to use this information is considering the status of a user, a new user, or a returning user. What click interactions are done by new ones and what are returning users clicking on? This information can lead to a specific activity that supports new users in their awareness phase to become returning users which generate conversions on your website. If we use the example of an e-commerce shop, it would be a major goal to transfer new customers into returning customers by providing them easy access to the information they need, like shipping details or specific offers.

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