Not another Google product, I hear you say. Something else to add to the “complex tools from Google that I must learn to understand in my spare time” list. Well, possibly, but this article will show you how Google Tag Manager can help you move from Starter to Savvy Business Owner status.

First off let’s explain what I mean by a Savvy Business Owner or SBO (not to be confused with an S… well, you know).

An SBO knows more about how prospects interact with their website than their competitors do. And if there is one place where the adage “knowledge is power” applies, online is it.

One benefit of online marketing is its ability to be measured. And what you can measure – as we all know – you can manage. So it follows that the more you measure, the more you know, which means the more you can manage.

But here’s the rub. In the online world, the devil is in the detail. SBOs know which detail matters and which doesn’t.

For instance, Starter Business Owners measure website visitor numbers using tools like Google Analytics. That’s all. They don’t track how many chose to play the video on the homepage – the one that cost $5000 and a week of blood, sweat and tears to produce.

SBOs, on the other hand, track both: visitor numbers and video engagement. They know that of the two minutes of video content, only the first 50 seconds is viewed by most visitors. They then know they have work to do, since all the “good stuff” happens during the first minute of video viewing. Then they do this work – editing the video down and ensure it opens with the best content.

And what about the Starter Business Owner whose home page requires the user scroll down to get all the content? Again, they will track just those who arrived. The SBO goes deeper, seeing how far down they scrolled. Then he discovers that just 25% actually make it past the halfway mark into the ¨services” content that tells them what the company can do for them. Then, in a stroke of genius, he re-orders the web content, building a services specific page and enticing people to click through to it.

As you can see, moving from Starter to Savvy Business Owner requires you to track every prospect interaction with your website. Once this data is in your Google Analytics account you can mine it to your heart’s content to guide your next actions.

Google Tag Manager makes it easier to get the data in there.

I like to think of Google Tag Manager as a magic “box of code” that sits on every page of your website. For all pages the box contains your normal Google Analytics tracking code. On some pages, however, the box also contains special code that relates to how the user interacts with that page; eg, plays a video or scrolls up and down.

Without this “box” your web developers would need to hand code custom programming to send Google Analytics the interaction data. Think expensive and time consuming. With Google Tag Manager it’s a breeze.

We have been using Google Tag Manager at Ark Advance for a few years. In that time we have developed a range of techniques for tracking specific behaviours and are adding to them all the time. Tracking YouTube-hosted video plays and page scrolling are just two.

Keen to upgrade yourself from Starter to Savvy Business owner? Give us a call today and we will get you started with Google Tag Manager and its magic box of code.