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Google Tag Manager for SaaS Founders

Google Tag Manager for SaaS Founders

SaaS founders and their go-to-market teams have to recognize the importance of tracking the behaviour of visitors and prospects and optimising their growth strategy accordingly to drive growth. To ensure seamless tracking of the journeys of website visitors, you need a powerful website tracking solution. And as you ponder about website tracking, you will come up with a list of several tracking codes & tags across multiple advertising and analytical platforms. Often, as a business owner or marketer, you will feel the need to outsource the implementation of tracking scripts & code to web developers to be able to have them installed on your website. This not only prolongs the procedure but it can also be expensive. This is where Google Tag Manager (GTM) enters the picture.

GTM is a free tag management tool provided by Google that makes managing and setting up tracking codes or tags easier without requiring any edits to the website codebase. Without the assistance of engineers, anybody with adequate access can design, test, and deploy tracking scripts & tags to your website. Implementing GTM can offer various benefits to SaaS teams, including better website tracking, increased flexibility, lower development costs, and improved website speed. This article will go through these benefits in-depth and describe how SaaS teams can utilise GTM to fulfil their company goals.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tag management application by Google that makes it easier to manage and deploy tracking codes & tags on a web page. It enables go-to-market teams to add numerous tracking codes & tags for data analytics, marketing, and other third-party applications to track and collect essential user data without having direct access to the website’s codebase. 

GTM works by injecting a single container tag on the page, which loads and maintains all tracking codes & tags. This allows you to manage several tags from a single location, rather than having to update the code of the website each time a new tag gets added or deleted. Google Analytics, AdWords, Facebook Pixel, and many more tags are supported by GTM.

A further benefit of Google Tag Manager is that it automatically codes the tag for you—the code you receive that you must place on your website is independently written by GTM. This eliminates a significant amount of human mistakes and accelerates the entire process.  

These tags enable businesses to employ one of their preferred functions, such as:

A. Ad platform tags – These are also known as advertising tags, enabling marketers to insert tracking codes of digital advertisement platforms and facilitating the connection of websites with ad platforms. 

B. Retargeting tags – These enable marketers to monitor website visitors and later target them with advertising.

What are the benefits of Google Tag Manager for SaaS Founders?

There are several advantages of adopting Google Tag Manager for SaaS founders. Here are some of the most powerful utilisation of GTM: 

1. Improved and simple website tag management: You can quickly install and maintain tracking codes and tags using Google Tag Manager, delivering more precise and complete data for assessing marketing campaigns, discovering user behaviour trends, and optimising conversion rates. With Google Tag Manager, you become that developer, capable of quickly implementing the tag (code). Google Tag Manager makes this procedure simple, rapid, and accessible to anyone who does not know how to code. 

2. Enhanced flexibility: Google Tag Manager enables SaaS teams to simply add and delete tracking codes & tags without modifying the website’s codebase. This makes it easy to try out new tools or techniques and adapt to evolving marketing or business requirements.

3. Reduce development expenses: Google Tag Manager is an application that you can utilise for free. Embedding tracking codes & tags directly into the coding of a website can prove time-consuming and costly, particularly for SaaS businesses with limited development assets. Google Tag Manager can help save these expenses by making it easier to add and manage tracking codes and tags.

4. Improves website performance: Google Tag Manager can help boost website efficiency and loading speed by asynchronously loading the tracking codes & tags directly incorporated in the website’s codebase, which can lead to enhanced user experience and better search engine results.

5. All tags are in a single location: When you use Google Tag Manager, you store all of your codes in one place. The days of locating the different JavaScript code snippets in the source code of a website or app in order to make additions, modifications, or removals are long gone. Everything is now in one location, and mistakes such as missing codes and incorrect data are no longer possible. So implementing changes and updates to a single tag affects all of the other tags.

6. Simple & automatic event tracking: GTM has a feature known as auto-event tracking, which automatically records events (such as clicks, submissions of forms, and time spent on a page) without the use of special JavaScript code. With auto-event tracking of Google Tag Manager, you can automatically monitor the website activities of visitors. 

7. Improved data security: Google checks all scripts and stops them instantly if you coincide with an unauthorised domain, internet protocol, or URL. By restricting access to the website’s coding, Google Tag Manager adds an extra degree of protection. Founders can provide selected team members or suppliers access to manage tracking codes & tags without jeopardising the privacy of the whole website’s codebase. GTM also supports whitelisting and blacklisting commands, which provide an additional level of security and protection to your SaaS website.

How can you set up Google Tag Manager for their company?

Setting up an account in Google Tag Manager is a simple two-step procedure that is distinct from your Google Analytics or Gmail accounts. Let’s have a quick look at how easily you can set up your GTM account for your business! 

1. Create an account in Google Tag Manager:

To begin, you should go to GTM & click on the green “Sign Up for Free” option. It will prompt you to provide your account name (business name), location, website URL, and in which platform you wish to utilise Google Tag (web, Aneroid, iOS, Android). When you’ve completed the process, press the blue “Create” button.

2. Create and Install a container:

After creating an account, you must establish a container for your website. A container is a code snippet that must be added to the website’s HTML in order for Google Tag Manager to handle tags. By selecting the “Create Container” option in the Google Tag Manager dashboard, SaaS owners can develop a new container. Once this is created, you can copy and paste the container code snippet into the web pages HTML, just after the opening <body> tag.

How to set up an account and container  in Google Tag Manager?

3. Add tags to the container:

Once the container code has been installed, you can begin adding tags to the container. This is useful for providing detailed reports on your audience’s behaviour, but it might become wasteful if your tags are not correctly organised. Tags such as Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, AdWords, and many more can be added. Let’s look at how to create a tag now:

A. Click the “Add a New Tag” button, within your GTM dashboard.

How to create a new tag in google tag manager?

B. Label your tag, followed by selecting a tag type by clicking anywhere in the “Tag Configuration” box. Then select a tag type. There are several kinds of tags (which can also be customised).

Tag configuration in Google Tag Manager

C. Assume you’ve picked Google Analytics as your tag. If you want your tag to be tracked in Google Analytics, enter your Web Property ID from your GA account. Then, choose a “Track Type” to specify the actions you want to be tracked on your website.

How to choose a tag in GTM?
How to choose a tag type in GTM?
How to choose 'Track Type' in Google Tag Manager?
How to choose ‘Track Type’ in GTM?

D. Next, select a trigger, which indicates when you want your tag to be recorded. Then pick the web pages for which you intend for this tag to be active (you can alternatively select ‘all pages’ if you prefer this tag to be active on all pages).

How to choose trigger in Google Tag Manager?
How to choose trigger in GTM?

E. When you’re content with your tag and trigger, press the “save” button.

How to save tags in Google Tag Manager?

4. Test & publish the container:

After adding all of the tags to the container, you should test it prior to publishing it to the web page. To see the tags in action, click the “Preview” button and then open the website in a new tab. Check that the tags are triggering properly and collecting the appropriate data. After you’ve checked and validated everything, click the “Submit” button to publish the container to the website.

4 best use cases of Google Tag Manager for SaaS teams.

Google Tag Manager provides several advantages and functionalities. Go-to-market teams often get confused about which are the best use cases that they should implement to get the best utilisation out of Google Tag Manager:

1. Goal monitoring: You can establish goal tracking for your web page or app using Google Tag Manager. You can also analyse the performance of your marketing initiatives and make decisions based on actual data to boost conversions by tracking particular activities, such as sign-ups or sales.

2. Conversion tracking: To assess the performance of your marketing activities, you can utilise GTM for setting up conversion tracking. You can measure conversions like sign-ups, free trials, and sales and optimise your ads depending on the data you have gathered.

3. Tracking user behaviour: Google Tag Manager can also be used to measure user behaviour on an app or website, such as their clicks, scroll depth, and form responses. This information can assist you in understanding how customers engage with your services and pinpoint areas for development.

4. Configure Cross-Domain Tracking: If your website redirects visitors to many different URLs but you want to include that as one, you can enable cross-domain tracking. Cross-domain tracking can assist you in better understanding the customer’s journey across several domains. For example, you can watch how a visitor arrives at your main website and then purchases your service from within your product which may be hosted on a different domain. 

To summarise, Google Tag Manager is more important than ever for SaaS Founders to deploy in 2023. It can assist you in tracking user behaviour, personalising user experiences, and making data-driven decisions to boost growth and conversions. With the SaaS industry’s rising competition, the ability to optimise marketing strategies and enhance user engagement is critical to success. Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool that can help you in meeting these objectives and stay ahead of the competition.

Even after gulping up all this information and utilisation of GTM, you can get stuck while implementing it or get confused on how to get the best utilisation of it for your business. Talk to our GTM Experts today, to implement Google Tag Manager today!



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