What is Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the now the preferred way of adding analytics – and other scripts and content – to your web pages.  Think of GTM as an umbrella script.  When your page loads it fires off and in turn launches your analytics code as well as things like third party heat map codes, Google Ad Words, and even custom written javascript or HTML.

You will need to update your websites to remove the previous Google Analytics code and replace it with the GTM code.  The advantage of doing this is that you should never have to touch the code on your web pages again.  All changes and updates are made in the GTM dashboard.  If you are not currently running Google Analytics, you should definitely add it through GTM rather than adding it as a stand-alone product.

An excellent video overview of GTM can be found at Google’s Analytics Academy Google Tag Manager Fundamentals course.  This will walk you through the basics of what Tag Manager is, how to install it, and how to use it.