Looking for a way to personalise your website, but budget is tight? In this guide, I show you how to provide a personalised experience using Google Tag Manager - 100% FREE.

In the last few days you might have seen an overlay banner in your Google Tag Manager account similar to the one above.

This is related to an email AdWords sent out at the beginning of September regarding the upcoming Safari update which introduces the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). 

The new technology intends to improve people’s privacy by using machine learning to determine which domains can track people across sites. It works by limiting tracking for the allowed domains by only letting cookies act in a third-party context for 24 hours. This article will explain what the Adwords Conversion Linker is, why it came about, and how you can implement it to avoid losing out on essential data.

What is Tag Management?

Tagging a site is adding some script tags to the head, body or footer of a site. If you’re running multiple analytics platforms, testing services, conversion tracking or even some dynamic or targeted content systems, it almost always require you to input scripts into your content management system’s core templates. Tag management systems (TMS) provide you with one script to insert into your template and then you can manage all others through the third party service. The tag management system allows you to build containers where you can intelligently organize the tags that you wish to manage.

"Contents

• Mis-tagging Social Media links and not separating paid and non-paid social campaigns
• Setting the medium to “cpc” when tagging Social Media campaigns
• Mixing lowercase and uppercase letters
• Making UTM parameter values difficult to read in campaign reports
• Incorrectly using ‘&’, ‘=’, ‘?’ and ‘#’ symbols in UTM tags
• Using UTM tags to track internal links
• Not testing tagged links before using them
• Creating unique campaign names for each medium and source
• Making spelling mistakes when using Google Analytics UTM tags
• Not following a consistent naming convention for UTM campaigns
• Confusing the purpose of  “utm_source” and “utm_medium” parameters
• Not using the mandatory utm_source parameter"

If you are similar to most people, it’s likely you are using the default attribution model in Google Analytics, i.e. Last Interaction.
Just because it is the default option, that does not mean it’s the right one for you. In this article, we will tell you how to set up a Google Analytics attribution model and UTM parameters based on your product and the stage of your company.

A solution is to use a tag management system (when one is installed and configured). In this article I’ll be referencing Google Tag Manager (GTM), which is the most widely used tag manager (accounting for 72.6% of the tag management market, according to BuiltWith.com). Tag managers use a single JavaScript container tag to inject various different tags (e.g. tracking, remarketing, and CRO tags) into webpages. The benefit of this is that in order to add or amend tags, it’s not necessary for a developer to make any changes to the page; changes can be made to the tags within a container and these tags will be implemented on the page.

Tag managers are mostly used to implement off-the-shelf tags, like Google Analytics or Facebook tracking. A lesser-known functionality is to implement custom HTML snippets (which can include JavaScript code). This allows you to make any arbitrary changes you like to the HTML of a page (or set of pages) based on rules you define. A benefit of using tag managers is that you can apply changes to pages at scale across a site with a single tag.

This allows us to bypass CMS restrictions and development queues, directly applying changes to things like page titles, canonical tags, and on-page content.

Just so you’re clear, GTM is not a replacement for Google Analytics, but instead works in conjunction with the tools you’re probably already using.
Here’s where we’re headed in this article.

• First, I want to encourage you to use GTM.
• Then I’ll show you how to set it up.
• Next, we’ll walk through the process of creating a tag, a trigger, and publishing it.

By the end of this article, you should have a solid understanding of tags and how to use them.

In a previous article, I shared how to implement Google Tag Manager and Universal Analytics. That’s a fairly basic starter just to get you off the ground, but Google Tag Manager is an incredibly flexible (and complex) tool that can be used for dozens of different strategies.

One of those strategies is the ability to populate Content Grouping in Universal Analytics using Google Analytics. This article is going to be a combination of problems to be aware of and a step-by-step guide in specifically implementing Content Grouping using DuracellTomi’s Google Tag Manager plugin for WordPress, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

Step 1: Setting Up Google Analytics Content Grouping
Step 2: Setting Up DuracellTomi’s WordPress Plugin for Google Tag Manager
Step 3: Setting Up Google Tag Manager
Step 4: Is Google Tag Manager Actually Working?
Step 5: Setting Up Content Groupings in Google Tag Manager