TAG! You’re it! Why You Should be Using Google for Tag Management on Your eCommerce Site
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tool that eCommerce site administrators and marketers can use to manage their sites’ “tags” from one central location. Tag management uses any type of dynamic code, such as JavaSript or an image and enables you to collect information from your site’s users, such as behavior and site traffic information. Tags can fall under many categories, including:
- Remarketing
- Affiliates
- Analytics
- Ad Tracking
- Search Tracking
There are a few reasons why GTM is a great resource for online stores. First and foremost it’s FREE, and very easy to use. But more specifically, GTM can drastically improve the performance of your store. Even if your developers have followed best practices for front-end performance, something as simple as putting JavaScript blocks at the bottom of a site page can delay the rendering of that page.
GTM avoids this by not loading any content until the DOM is ready, and once that happens, it loads the tags asynchronously. This means that a slow loading tracking pixel or block of script is not going to adversely affect the perceived page load speed for a user. While slower response times on an eCommerce site almost always translates into lower revenue for the retailer, GTM avoids this problem. As a site owner, GTM gives you the benefit of all the tracking, but with little to no cost in performance.
GTM not only helps the performance of your site, but also can save you time and money in development. That is, if you were to contact your development team every time you needed to hardcode a tracking pixel in a page footer, it could take anywhere from a few hours to even a few weeks to complete the task. If you are managing multiple sites, perhaps even with different teams of developers for each one, then the complexity of what seems to be a simple task increases substantially. However, with GTM, you role as a middleman is eliminated. Instead, you have the control to open up the GTM dashboard, create new tracking pixels for each site, and can publish pages in minutes.
While Google Tag Manager is a fast, easy, and reliable tool, some may prefer to use a tagging system with more features and more robust solutions. For example, Tealium has hundreds of built in tags that you can very easily drop into your site without touching any code. If you don’t want to worry about code, or perhaps are looking for a more intricate solution with dedicated support, one of these commercial options might be for you:
No matter what tool you choose to utilize, tagging your site will undoubtedly have a positive impact on your online store through better performance and by streamlining your development process.
