While adding Google Analytics through GTM is easy to do, the real value of Tag Manager is the ability for it to launch multiple tags at once.  These may be completely separate custom or third party scripts, or it may be specific Google Analytics events.

One common use for Tag Manager is to track binary downloads, such as for PDFs.  This is a relatively straightforward process.

  • Create a new Downloads tag
  • Make the Tag Type be Universal Analytics
  • Add your Tracking ID
  • For the Track Type, choose Event
  • Under Event Tracking Parameters, add “download” (or whatever you want the label to be when you look for the event in the GA dashboard) to the Category box.
  • Under Event Tracking Parameters, add “click” to the Action box.
  • Under Event Tracking Parameters, use the {{Click URL}} built-in variable to pass the link clicked upon to the “download” category in the GA dashboard.
  • For the Trigger, use the Just Links option
  • For the trigger configuration use Page URL - matches RegEx - *
  • Then select the Some Link Clicks option and set the configuration to be
    Click URL Path - matches RegEx - \.(pdf|doc|docx|xls|xlsx|png|jpg|ppt|pptx|zip|svg|ai|indd)$   Modify this string to match whatever file types you want to track.
  • Save the Tag/Trigger combination.  Now when a user clicks on a link to any of the listed file types it will add that event to your GA dashboard.

Note that you could easily modify this tag/trigger to track links from a particular part of your web page…a footer link for example.  Just add a different tracking parameter category and update the RegEx in your trigger to match a class or ID from one of your HTML tags.