Anyone running a Shopify store knows there are hundreds of Shopify apps, integrations and connections in the ecommerce world that can help you grow faster.
But from Google Ads, DoubleClick, and Facebook Ads to custom plugins, many tools require you to insert scripts on the pages that need tagging, and for a lot of store owners, this can be a huge hassle without asking for developer help.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) can launch new tags with just a few clicks. As the world’s most popular enterprise-grade tag management solution, Google Tag Manager supports both Google and third-party tags.
We’ve written quite a few articles on Google Tag Manager (including a full FAQ) and how to use it, but until now, we haven’t dug deep into why you should use GTM. Here are 3 reasons why:
1. Reliable and accurate ecommerce data
When your tags aren’t working properly, they can hurt your site performance, resulting in slow load times, website unavailability, or a loss of functionality.
That’s why it’s critical to have a tag management solution in place that allows you to quickly determine the status of your tags.
Easy-to-use error checking and speedy tag loading in Google Tag Manager means you know for certain that every tag works. You can rest assured knowing your mission-critical data is being collected reliably and accurately!
Your IT team will also feel confident that the site is running smoothly, so everyone’s happy, even during busy holidays or the launch of a new campaign.
Large brands have implemented GTM to launch their tags exactly for this reason: reliable and accurate ecommerce data.
PizzaHut, Made.com, AgeUK and many other brands running on Shopify use GTM to manage their tags for Google and third-party platforms.
Setting up Enhanced Ecommerce via GTM
In Google Analytics, the main benefit of using Enhanced Ecommerce tracking (EEC) over standard ecommerce implementation is the amount of valuable reports you have access to as a merchant with EEC.
But that’s not all—you can also segment data based on ecommerce events, such as:
- Which users visited your product pages
- Where your shoppers hit a roadblock in the customer journey (e.g. a shopper viewed a product but never added to cart)
- Which step of the checkout process a shopper abandoned cart
This kind of data helps you zoom in on your sales funnel and update the parts of the process that either stall conversions or slow down the path to purchase.
Enchanced Ecommerce implementation is no walk in the park, but it does depend on a few things:
- How large is your store?
- How many Google Analytics custom dimensions do you need to add?
- What type of custom dimensions? etc.
Without question, Google Tag Manager is the easiest way to enable Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics — and we can help with that!
Do you already use GTM? If you already use GTM to track page views, you must send ecommerce data via Google Tag Manager.
If you don’t already use GTM…It’s a simple setup: activate EEC within your Google Analytics tags and use a dataLayer as an ecommerce data source. Just make sure the dataLayer contains all ecommerce data!
2. Quickly deploy Google and third-party tags
With so many tracking tools out there, marketers need flexibility—whether that’s changing tags on the fly or having the ability to easily add tags from other sources.
In GTM, marketers can add or change their own tags as needed. Google Tag Manager supports all tags and has easy-to-use templates for a wide range of Google and third-party tags for web and mobile apps.
Don’t see a tag listed? You can add it immediately as a custom tag. With this much flexibility, your campaign can be underway with just a few clicks.
Even if you are using Google Ads (Adwords), Adroll, Facebook, Hotjar, Criteo or your own script, you can implement it with Google Tag Manager.
Even if you’re a publisher as, let’s say, nationalgeographic-magazine.com, sell furniture at Made.com, sell event tickets as eventbrite.com or organise courses as redcrossfirstaidtraining.co.uk, GTM is the best way to organise all the scripts your partners provides.
3. Collaborate across the enterprise and make tag updates efficiently
Collaboration across a large team can be a challenge. Not having the proper tools can stall workflows, which decreases productivity and efficiency.
Workspaces and granular access controls allow your team to work together efficiently within Google Tag Manager:
- Multiple users can complete tagging updates at the same time and publish changes as they’re ready
- Multi-environment testing lets you publish to different environments to ensure things are working as expected
I don’t know about you, but every time I need to add a new script on my website, I hesitate out of fear my website will break and I wouldn’t know how to fix it.
I wanted a solution where I could add a script on my own, test it and then publish it without any developer help. And then I found Google Tag Manager.
GTM lets you collaborate and work independently, at the same time, on the same website. You can publish a tag at the same time your teammate is creating an A/B testing experiment, all in the same GTM container.
Adding Google Tag Manager to Shopify will help increase the value of your store and the accuracy of your Shopify tracking. GTM is free, it’s reliable, and you can find plenty of how-tos on online so you can start using it right away.
Google Tag Manager currently provides out-of-the-box integrations with:
- Google Analytics
- AdWords Conversion Tracking
- AdWords Remarketing (aka Google Ads, which we integrate with for accurate marketing attribution)
- DoubleClick
- Google Optimize (which we have a connection for!)
- Google Surveys Website Satisfaction – Google Surveys
- AdRoll
- Crazy Egg
- Hotjar
- Yieldify
- and more
This out-of-the-box integration doesn’t require any special knowledge. And, for any other script that you might have, we can walk you through the process of integrating Google Tag Manager and Shopify.
Questions about GTM? Get in touch with our team of Shopify experts and Google Analytics consultants!
Quick links
- Building funnels and triggering other marketing tags in GTM
- How to set up Enhanced Ecommerce tracking via GTM
- Google Tag Manager FAQ
- Connecting your Google Analytics store for accurate Shopify tracking
