{"id":1928,"date":"2017-06-06T22:21:26","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T02:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gregcruce.com\/?p=1928"},"modified":"2017-06-06T22:21:26","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T02:21:26","slug":"google-tag-manager-vs-google-analytics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gregcruce.com\/google-tag-manager-vs-google-analytics\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics"},"content":{"rendered":"
It’s a question that’s asked often – “How do you use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager together”?\u00a0Once it’s clear what each tool does, it’s relatively easy\u00a0to imagine how they work together.<\/p>\n
Nearly everyone in Internet Marketing has heard of Google Analytics – it’s a service that gives incredible tracking and information about website visitors. Google Tag Manager is somewhat new to many people, and new things can be a little intimidating and mysterious. So what are the differences in Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics?<\/p>\n
Google Tag Manager is a way to dynamically add tags to a website. Tags can be\u00a0Javascript code, tags, and pixels.<\/p>\n
Tag Manager uses a web interface to add and specify conditions when certain tags should be active on a page.<\/p>\n
Google Analytics is a service that uses Javascript tags to record\u00a0information about website visitors and pages visitors look at.<\/p>\n
Once installed\u00a0on a website, \u00a0Google Analytics automatically collects basic information, but can be extended with Google Analytics Event Tracking and other customizations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Google Tag Manager extends and complements Google Analytics beautifully. Together, Google Tag Manager allows marketers to expand Google Analytics data collection abilities – with little to no help needed from a developer.<\/p>\n
Some examples of ways that Google Tag Manager can extend Google Analytics are:<\/p>\n
Of course, these interactions were possible with Google Analytics – but these interactions usually required a developer publishing code to a website. This can and does slow down dynamic marketing teams who need data fast. Tag Manager offers a much faster publishing engine, allowing marketing teams to rapidly tag and track information with minimal developer involvement.<\/p>\n
However, there are some places where using both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics together can go awry.<\/p>\n
Having both GTM code and GA code (and both using the same Google Property ID) would result in double-pageviews, a zero bounce rate, and all sorts of data integrity issues.<\/p>\n
If you are confident your site has no event tracking or custom GA code, is as easy:<\/p>\n
If you do have custom event tracking in the code, things get a little more involved.<\/p>\n
When migrating a website from Analytics to Tag Manager, it’s common to use a “testing” Google Property ID in Tag Manager versus the live websites Google Property ID . This “duplicate” approach works well since you can test your GTM installation on a live site while still capturing live data in a live GA property.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nearly everyone in Internet Marketing has heard of Google Analytics \u2013 it\u2019s a service that gives incredible tracking and information about website visitors. Google Tag Manager is somewhat new to many people, and new things can be a little intimidating and mysterious. So what are the differences in Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1940,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,88],"tags":[63],"yoast_head":"\n