Google tag manager is a free tool that can give marketers a wealth of data about visitor behavior on their site not available through Google Analytics alone, Steve Guberman, director of search marketing at the Golf Channel’s GolfNow site, told a session Tuesday at the Internet Summit in Raleigh.
Guberman has appeared on numerous SEO/SEM podcasts such as Marketing Nerds and WebCertain.tv. Most recently Steve was a team member for SEO on the NBC Olympics website. Ironically, he said, “I don’t golf.”
He does know his Google tags, however. Google Tag Manager, also known as GTM, is a free tag management tool. It lets users deploy various marketing and analytics tags on a web site or mobile app. It’s JavaScript code that collects measurement and marketing data it sends to a third party service such as Google Analytics, Adwords, and others. It makes advanced tracking of user behavior possible.
Right off the bat, Guberman brought up a slide with these resources:
- http://measureschoo.com
- http://www.lunametrics.com/labs/recipes
He then showed the session audience what they can do with Google tags.
“All this is high level information Google doesn’t usually give you,” he said.
More highlights
Among other things, he noted:
- It will tell you exactly how many users are on your site, firing every 15 seconds.
- It will track their scrolling, revealing a declining number as they go the page. “Most viewers don’t make it to the bottom,” he said.
- It will show how many times a viewer clicks play or pause on a video.
- It will show you snippets of text copied by a user.
- It will show you page load time.
