You Ask, I Answer: Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics Integration?

In today's episode, Eric asks, here's my problem. I've installed the Google Analytics tracking code with the Monster Insights plugin on WordPress for my site. I've heard that if I add Google Tag Manager to track my site, this will double website stats and skew my data. Implementing can double count your tracking. Does this mean I can't use Google Tag Manager?

Because if I create a GTM account, this requires me to install GTM tracking code to connect with my GA for things to work, right? So Google Tag Manager is a tag management system. It's a container. It's like a cup or a bucket that you put stuff in. When you install Google Tag Manager by default, uh it's empty, right?

There's a tag manager container and there's nothing in the container. One of the things that you do out of the gate once you've installed Tag Manager is you then put tags inside the container like Google Analytics, for example. Now, if you have a Google Analytics tag inside a Tag Manager container and you have Google Analytics also running on the site, then yes, you will get some skewed data. You'll get a 0% bounce rate, and you will get double counting of your stats, which is obviously bad. So the thing to do, the way to do this is to I'm I'm guessing you use Monster Insights, so therefore you have a WordPress website.

Uh Thomas Geiger's plugin is excellent. I'll put a link in the show notes to it. You install Tag Manager on your website, and then you configure Tag Manager to do things like Google Analytics tracking, etc. And then you remove your Google Analytics plugin and tags so that you don't you don't need those anymore. Tag Manager at that point is running itself and Google Analytics for you.

So it is inclusive. It's it's it the it's got the t Google Analytics tag in the bucket. So let's see just the basics of what this would look like. I'm gonna flip over here. Inside Tag Manager, you have your tags, your triggers, and your variables.

So the variables, the one you're gonna want to start with uh is you're gonna want to start a new custom variable, which would go down here and call it whatever you like when you start a new variable configuration here, name and something, and you'll notice that in the list of things that you can do, one of them is a Google Analytics settings variable. And this variable is where you'll put in your tracking ID, the UA dash whatever your number is. And when you're talking about some of the more advanced features, uh you'll want to do things like turn on display advertising features. You may or may not need e-commerce features. Uh you may or may not want to use uh other uh uh functions like cross-domain tracking.

If you've got uh multiple domains. I'm gonna discard this because I already have a Google Analytics tracking tag on here and see that I've got my tag, my analytics account number. So the variable essentially tells will tag tell tag manager, here's my Google Analytics account. So that's part one. Part two is you'll need an actual Google Analytics tag.

So again, let's go ahead and click new here, and you'll be able to see Google Analytics, the universal analytics tag. This is the one that most people most of the time are going to use. You're gonna track things like page views, and this is where you'll choose that Google Analytics variable, the one that you said. I have some experimental versions in here, so there should be only the one if you've only created the one variable. This now contains your e-commerce settings, your display advertising features, all that stuff that you'd want for advanced application of Google Analytics here, and you never have to worry about mistyping the ID number if you've done it right the first time.

Obviously, name this something sensible. And then you'd want to trigger this on all pages. And by doing this, uh you'd hit save. Again, I'm not going to hit save here because I already have it installed. Um you would have your Google Analytics uh tag, right?

This would be the only one in there. Um all this other stuff is stuff I've also put on my website. You would hit submit to publish it. And now Google Tag Manager, if if I we were pretending I'd just done this from scratch, would now have information that about Google Analytics and would be running the tag. So as long as Google Tag Manager was installed on your website through that plugin, then you will have uh Google Analytics running.

And now you would go in and remove all the other old Google Analytics stuff. Doing it this way, you get all the features of Google Analytics. You can see you can turn as many of them as you on as you want. But you also can see there's lots of other things in my uh tag manager account. And this is the real benefit of tag manager.

If you were to copy and paste all these other tags, you know, Amazon codes, Facebook tracking pixels, uh, Twitter tags, uh you name it. If you were to put all that stuff on your website, your your page load times would increase, your site would slow down, uh possibly things would conflict and beat each other up, um, and there's the potential for hostile code to run. Uh you know, if you're just copying pasting JavaScript's willy nilly into your site. Google Tag Manager offers a little bit of protection, not much, but a little bit against hostile code, but allows you to track all of this other stuff in one container. Remember, back to this whole container thing.

When you do that, Tag Manager loads, the rest of your site goes on loading for the user, and then Tag Manager takes care of running the stuff inside its container, however long that takes, which means that the user experience on your website isn't impacted by loading all this crap and letting making the user wait for it to all load. Especially if you have a tag that malfunctions. If a vendor went down, like their their servers were down, a tag could hang and you would get like half a web page loaded. By having Tag Manager there, it takes care of that for you. So to sum up, you absolutely want to use Tag Manager instead of Google Analytics by having Google Analytics inside Tag Manager.

If you do that, things will run better. It's a lot easier to maintain your website because you don't have to have all these plugins for all these different uh tagging systems. It's in a consolidated place, and you get all the advanced functionality of Tag Manager. There's some really cool stuff you can do with it. Um conditional firing of tags, you know, uh different goal settings, tracking different types of goals in Google Analytics.

If you want to learn more about Tag Manager, I recommend taking Google's free course on it. Go if you go to Analytics Academy.withGoogle.com, uh, there's free courses from Google, right from the horse's mouth, uh, about how to get started with Google Analytics, with Tag Manager, with Data Studio, all these things that are in the Google marketing platform. And I strongly recommend that if you want to just get the basics down, you take those courses. They're totally free, and you'll gain a lot of useful knowledge from them. If you have follow-up questions on this, please leave a comment in the comments box below.

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