Using Google Tag Manager to Gain Insight

In the digital era, the best sales, marketing, and business decisions are made from data-driven user information. But how do companies gather this information without intruding on a user’s experience or gathering sensitive information?

Solutions such as the web-based Google Tag Manager allow you to manage and deploy tags in one place without having to tinker so much with the web code. Information from tags is invaluable to marketing teams, as they are able to better curate content for the website that will resonate with more users and drive more traffic. The captured information also helps the sales team by giving insights into the questions and problems people are having that lead them to find an answer on your website.

Tags can provide key insights into information such as how users:

• interact and click through a designated website;
• follow links and flow through content from one page to the next;
• navigate within a page (such as how far they scroll down); and
• how they found the website in the first place.

Let’s take a deeper look into how to set up these integrations on an existing Plone website.

Setting up Google Tag Manager

Plone makes it easy to add analytics snippets to your website.

1. From the Site Setup overview, navigate to the Site Settings control panel.
2. Paste your web analytics code into the “JavaScript for web statistics support” field.
3. Save.

That's it. Google Tag Manager is now enabled on your site.

Once Google Tag Manager (GTM) is set up, you can configure and publish tags from the GTM control panel without updating the site code again.

To create a tag, we need to configure two parts: the Tag Configuration and the Trigger. The Tag Configuration defines the type of tag and what information it captures, and the Trigger fires our tag based on certain types of events.

Here are a few examples of tags you can set up to get the most out of your web analytics:

Tracking how far a user scrolls down the page

To capture scrolling events, set up two tags: Scroll Depth and Element Visibility. In this example, I’ll use the built-in Scroll Depth trigger type to set up this tag, and define four scroll depth landmarks at which the tag will fire: 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the page length. When the tag fires, the depth of the current landmark is captured.

Here is what that looks like in GTM:

Tag Configuration

Tag Type - Google Analytics: Universal Analytics
Track Type - Event
Category - Scroll
Action - {{Scroll Depth Threshold}}%
Non-Interaction Hit - True
Google Analytics Settings - UA tracking ID

Trigger Configuration

Trigger type: Scroll Depth
Vertical Scroll Depth: Selected
Percentages: 25, 50, 75, 100 %
Window Load (gtm.load)
This trigger fires on : All Pages

Tracking which Elements are visible on a page

In this example, CSS classes are used to trigger an Element Visibility tag. The homepage has a distinct CSS class for each content section so each can be targeted with the element selector .hp-content > div. If a user lingers on a target div section for at least three seconds, the tag fires and the {{Element Classes}} Action captures the CSS class.

Here is what that looks like in GTM:

Tag Configuration

Tag Type - Google Analytics: Universal Analytics
Track Type - Event
Category - Homepage Visibility
Action - {{Element Classes}}
Non-Interaction Hit - True
Google Analytics Settings - UA tracking ID

Trigger Configuration

Trigger Type - Element Visibility
Selection Method - CSS Selector
Element Selector - .hp-content > div
When to fire this trigger - Every time an element appears on screen
Minimum Percent Visible - 25 percent
Set minimum on-screen duration - 3000 milliseconds

For more detailed instructions, visit How to Deploy Universal Analytics with Tag Manager.

By setting up these tags, you can capture user-generic data on what visitors are reading on your website. For example, assuming visitors stay on a specific section for more than a second to avoid counting bots, a “Homepage Scroll” tag can provide information regarding what percentage of the home page a visitor scrolls through before going to another page — or leaving the site.

According to Google Tag Manager, 5.55% of visitors to the Six Feet Up’s site scroll to the bottom of the page. 

By learning more about what people are looking for, you can begin filling that search void with the user data provided by Google Tag Manager.

Have another idea on how Google Tag Manager could be useful? Want to share your ideas with us? Drop us a note here.