I am using Google Tag Manager on all my sites now to implement Google Analytics and future proof them for any other scripts.
I am putting GTM in my boilerplate.
Is there any reason this might not be good practice?
Any reason why a website (that needs GA) should avoid Google Tag Manager?
Most websites will require some sort of Javascript code added in the future for affiliate tracking, various analytics and having GTM installed will allow for easy installation of any such JS code easily.
Or, as Google puts it: "Why wait months for site code updates? Google Tag Manager lets you launch new tags any time with a few clicks, so you never miss a measurement or marketing opportunity."
Since GTM does not come with a service level agreement you could (very very tenuously) argue that GTM adds an additional point of failure. And if one wanted to be pedantic one could point out that not all ways of analytics tracking work with GTM (if you track serverside via the measurement protocol).
But real life argument, there is none (IMO).
There might be pages that do not greatly profit from GTM (or any other Tag Management) if all you do is to deploy a single analytics tag to track pageviews. But the second you need to track an event or pass data GTM is already worth it.
This is not meant to be merely opinion based, it's more that in 2,5 years of using GTM on large sites I have been unable to find any scenario where the tag management code has caused any technical problem or interfered with existing code. On the other hand I do not write click handlers or submit handlers anymore, I have a boilerplate template for a container tag in which I just have to replace values for a few macros before I import it to GTM and have tracking up and running, I can set data fields with much less trouble than via the code... so I think there is a real technical argument to make in favour of GTM, and none against it.
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I find Google documentation around Google Tag Manager (GTM) terrible at helping me figure out which bits go where.
As I understand, GTM requires that you put a <script> snippet on your pages which is supposed to bring in other code snippets, as could be configured by a non-technical user.
I'm a technical user, though. Perhaps that's the problem! I also find it problematic that Google use the word "tag" to refer to either an HTML element tag, like <script>, or their own proprietary use of the word to mean calling a function ("triggering a tag") in another script, also unhelpfully referred to as a tag.
They also have "gtag" which is what - a helper? something that enables you to send general analytics events through the GTM API? The docs simply say:
The global site tag (gtag.js) is a JavaScript tagging framework and API that allows you to send event data to Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Marketing Platform.
... but we could already send analytics? What does this add?
For example, I wish to send an e-commerce Purchase event.
I've found that to do this I needed to add a new snippet of code with two <script> tags to the header on the site (thought GTM meant I didn't need to do this?) that sources gtag.js, then I'm able to call the following at the appropriate place in my javascript:
gtag('event', 'purchase', { value: 1.23, transaction_id: 'test' });
Or without it (although this does not seem to work):
ga('require', 'ec');
ga('ec:addProduct', {name: 'test product', price: 1.23})
ga('ec:setAction', 'purchase', { id: 'test_id_1', revenue: 1.23 })
So my question is: when would you use gtag() over ga(), and why can't GTM install gtag?
When would you use gtag() over ga()?
Use gtag if you want to send data to supported Google products other than Google Analytics. As you pointed out, "The global site tag (gtag.js) is a JavaScript tagging framework and API that allows you to send event data to Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Marketing Platform.", whereas ga only works for Google Analytics. But (see below), you might decide to never use gtag nor ga and always use GTM.
Why can't GTM install gtag?
It could (you could have a GTM tag inserting some gtag code) but it's beside the point as they are meant to be used as 2 different solutions:
gtag is a purely programmatic tracking tool for sending data and only works with 3 Google products (so far - Analytics, Ads, Marketing Platform - more maybe added in the future), it's made to provide basic out-of-the-box tracking with a simple copy/paste + small lines of code (if needed for customization).
GTM is a tag manager: it can work programmatically BUT requires a minimal configuration of the container via the GTM UI (a default container won't send data anywhere), and can send data to whatever products you want (just need to setup the corresponding tags in GTM), while having a bunch of other features
A few questions to help you choose:
Am I sending data to other tools than Google Analytics/Ads/Marketing platform?
Do I want to use some the extra features GTM offers (UI, version control, templates, debug, environments etc...)?
Is there some tracking that would be heavy to implement via pure custom JS (eg scroll tracking) which GTM can facilitate with its built-in listeners (eg scroll tracking)?
If YES to any of the above, then use GTM
I personally never use gtag, I always replace it with GTM because it's considerably more powerful than gtag.
What Google is doing is progressively replacing all their default snippets with gtag so they only have 1 unified API to maintain and it's an easy copy/paste for users (bear in mind most users aren't tech savy and just need to paste the snippets in into their CMS). Forcing people to use GTM would be too much of a friction as out-of-the-box GTM simply doesn't track anything and people would need to learn & configure GTM, too much work vs a simple copy/paste.
Note: The built-in events don't use category, label, and value. Take care to use the correct keys when sending these events.
Analytic tagging service like Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics, Amplitude, MixPanel, Flurry etc all requires you to map a tag name to an action in your application like a button click or a page view.
For a small application, it is easy to keep track of the tag as in you would know which tag does what in which page. But in a huge application where you have hundreds of tags, it is hard to keep track of which tag does what.
The result is stakeholders regularly asks the developer to trace back to that particular action and provide them with the tag name.
For a non-technical person (without debugging or looking at the code), how does one knows which tag does what in which page? Is there any tools to help keep track of the tags?
You need Tag Management System, for example, Google Tag Manager.
I found 10% high number of sessions in the GTM analyitcs data than the GA. Both has different tracking properties, have similar settings(as Simoahava mentioned #here), Hence the Ecommenrce rate is affecting due to huge difference of sesions data in both properties. Any insights ?
Screenshots :
Session via GTM Session via GA
Even when out of scope for the question i need to advice you to remove the legacy UA code from site and just duplicate the hits from GTM. (Simo has a post about it)
Now going into the question it self this can have a couple of reasons:
Does the filters on both views match?
Does both views has the same region (on the config)?
And i have another theory but this is not at all checked. (i would like to look into it)
GTM has a noscript snippet which allows to send non-script dependent tags even when javascript is not enabled. This is an advantage against the old GA code which doent have this feature.
Point i may have to look into:
Does the pageview count as a non-script dependent tag?
Is the traffic without javascript that relevant in volume? (10% is a lot)
Hope it helps !
I have site which run on Google Analytics for some time( more than 1 year), now I want to use Google Tag Manager. If i remove Google Analytics from site, and start tracking with tag manager, there is a risk of losing data?
It's really hard to give a helpful answer to that - if you manage a seamless switch between GTM and inline GA code, and have set up everything correctly then you will not lose data. Is there a risk you make mistakes ? Probably.
I recommend to integrate GTM alongside GA and set up your GA tags so that they track to a test property. Then you can compare both properties to make sure that you track actually the same things. And that point you can throw out the inline GA code and switch to GTM (if you implement the tracking id as a variable in GTM it will be as simple as changing a single variable).
But remember to actually remove the inline code, else you will end up with double pageviews.
I am working on a third party website that contains a web application embedded in an iframe on the home page. This iframe is hosted on the same same sub/domain.
Currently page views are being tracked with _trackPageview. Due to a requirement by marketing both pages use the same Google account Id.
Since the iFrame was implemented the marketing department has noticed that the bounce rate has dropped to almost nothing. I suspect that this is because Google is interpreting the pageView event on the iframe as the visitor hitting another page on the website.
Just for additional information, the domain of the _gaq object is being set to "none" for both the container page and iframe.
Does Google provide a mechanism by which you can trigger PageView in such a way that it isn't interpreted as subsequent pageview in this scenario? (I know that trackEvent has a noninteraction property to deal with this?)
Am I better off just disabling the PageView for the default iframe page?
Does Google provide a mechanism - apparently yes, but probably not for your use case.
The field documentation for Universal Analytics describes the non-interaction field thusly:
Specifies that a hit be considered non-interactive.
So in UA this does no seem limited to events but to apply to all hits (which would include pageviews). I want to point out that I have no tested it and that it seems counterintutive, so it might simply be that the documentation is incomplete/wrong here.
However as you are using "classical" Analytics this does not apply to you. Since upgrading the code is a good idea in any case you might want to push for an update to Universal Analytics (this piqued my curiosity so I will test this over the next few days and update this answer with the results - maybe you want to wait until then, or simply test it yourself).
It's possible, but not 100% clear to me that disabling the PageView event on the iframe will prevent your users from registering a page exit (the pageview may get recorded regardless). You can try removing that event and see if it works.
But a better way may be to implement a custom filter on a new View excluding traffic to that specific class of iframes. Make sure you keep your old View (or create a new one with further filters) to make sure you're capturing those iframe views, if you think that's necessary.