OK, fine. Go ahead and file this post under the ‘NOT breaking news’ category. We won’t be offended! But sometimes taking a look back is a good thing. So today, we talk Google Tag Manager, maybe better known as GTM. GTM was released in October 2012; we’ve used GTM for the past year or so, and we love it!

So, what is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags — including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more—with just a few clicks, and without needing to edit your website code!

Google released this cool tool a couple years ago. Maybe more. But lots of people still don’t really know what it is, or why to use it. Think of GTM as a handy container for all those messy tracking pixels and tags, all in one tidy place. That’s about all you, as a marketer, really need to know. Once added, it really unleashes tons of possibilities in tracking user and behavior-based activity on virtually anything that interacts with your website.

So, if it’s not obvious, here’s some top reasons why you should use GTM:

1. It’s (pretty) easy for you to set up!
2. Once set up, it really is easy to add new tags
3. What this all means is, you don’t need to bug your webmaster to add new tracking tags and codes for you, you can do it yourself, and,
4. When all of your tags are in GTM, your site will load and respond much more efficiently!
5. It’s free. And just like the free version of Google Analytics, it’s a tight product. Not a ‘get what you pay for’ scenario.

In upcoming posts, we’ll walk you through step-by-step how to implement GTM on your site, and some additional uses of Google-supplied tags including GTM codes and Event tags!