How Google Tag Manager helped FarmChief
You’ve paid to be found on Google (both your ongoing search engine related site tweaks and your active paid Google Ads campaign) and this is bringing your website visitors. Brilliant!
But Google Analytics is showing that these people aren’t really looking at much on your website or submitting any forms, what’s up with that?!
Whilst you’re thinking there’s something wrong with your online marketing efforts, or your website, it may not be that dramatic.
FarmChief was experiencing this scenario. They could see visitors coming onto their website from various marketing efforts but they didn’t seem to be getting the enquiries they were after.
We created some measuring code to track the use of the FarmChief click-to-call links on their site and with that simple bit in place, we were able to show that their customers were entering their website and immediately clicking on the phone number to speak to someone in person, without needing any further information.
This means that all their hard work was paying off! Just not in the way that they’d originally anticipated. This is important information both for measuring the success of their marketing, but also for creating any online content.
It was the additional information available through Google Tag Manager that made this assurance possible.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tag management system for tracking user behaviour on websites (among other things). It can shine a light on what users are actually doing on your site which in turn can help you make better marketing and website development decisions.
Why use Google Tag Manager?
What is the primary purpose of your website? Why do you even have one? Why go through the hassle of creating a website if you don’t know whether or not it’s doing its job effectively?
Websites are commonly used to market your business and provide a way for potential customers to take a look at what you do. The hope then is that any potential customers continue the journey by initiating contact with you or your team.
This can be done in many ways: from contact form submission through to email enquiries and the humble phone call. Each is important but unfortunately, it can be hard to track or differentiate where exactly new customers are coming from.
Tracking all customer sources
A common example of this is enquiries generated from phone calls. Often it can be hard to know what initiated these calls in the first place. Compare this with contact forms whose submissions can generally only come from one place on the website, the contact form.
When it comes to phone calls however it may not even be the website that has prompted the call and that means it’s not always clear what part of your marketing plan is really doing the business. Google Tag Manager can help you clear up some of that confusion.
Wait a second…
Doesn’t Google Analytics do that already?
Google Analytics is an absolutely fantastic tool to track and report on website traffic. However, it doesn’t offer the amount of detail that Google Tag Manager does when it comes to getting into tracking specific user interactions on a website.
This doesn’t mean to say that Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are mutually exclusive. Far from it! Like good team players, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager complement each other fantastically. In fact, Google Tag Manager can provide the data that Google Analytics so elegantly displays and reports on.
It’s a tag team relationship that together provides the best website engagement data around.
With all the many ways customers can get in touch with you, it’s important to know where they’re coming from.
What should I track?
Well, what do you want to know? If you’re getting a minimal amount of contact form submissions but your phone is ringing off the hook, you might want to know exact figures for these so you can have peace of mind that although contact form submission may be on the low side your website is generating plenty of phone calls. This is especially important for sites that get a lot of visits from mobile devices. It’s much easier for your visitors to click on a phone number on a website than try to fill in a contact form.
Or maybe you need to know what page your form submissions are coming from so you can better drive submissions on the pages that aren’t performing so well.
Whatever you track it needs to have a purpose; there is no point tracking for tracking’s sake. If you are spending your hard-earned cash on marketing your site wouldn’t it be nice to know what pages are doing the job for you? Google Tag Manager can tell you that.
Here are some events that we commonly track with Google Tag Manager…
- Phone calls
Get an understanding of how many phone enquiries your website is generating and from which pages. - Emails
Like phone calls, it can be hard to know where your email enquiries are coming from. If it’s from the website we can track it with Google Tag Manager. - Form submissions
You may already be able to see how many forms have been submitted to your website. However, what you may not know already is what page these submissions are coming from or you may just want this information grouped with your analytics data for a better overall picture of the website’s engagement. For example, how many form submissions are coming from each of your Google Ad campaigns? What are you actually paying for each form submission? - Newsletter signps
This information should already be stored someone for you to see, usually in your email marketing system. However, newsletter signup forms are very commonly found in a site’s footer, and therefore any page on the website can prompt the user to complete the form. With Google Tag Manager you can see exactly which pages seal the deal with new subscribers and perhaps more importantly which ones do not.
Understanding your website better
The bottom line is Google Tag Manager gives you a more detailed look into how well your website is doing its job. By providing more information about how users interact with your website, Google Tag Manager, in conjunction with Google Analytics, can indeed shed some light on your website visitors’ user experience.
This information can provide valuable insights into what is driving customer inquiries on your website and (perhaps more importantly) what is not.
Next steps
If you would like to know more about Google Tag Manager and how to set it up for your website visit Google has a number of articles on how to do so. If you are willing to put in the time and have a good background on how websites work, setting up a few basic Google Tag Manager tags can be achieved.
Alternatively here at Mogul, we can do this for you. We provide Google Tag Manager set up and, interlinked with our SEO services, can help you to understand your website’s engagement better.
Give us a call on +64 6 877 7478. Or send us an email at office@mogul.nz to find out more!
