Have you heard about Google’s revamped Tag Manager? For years Google has been finessing ways to unify all products under their “Tag” platform. All products associated with “tags” would fall under this category, products like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Tag Manager and Google Optimize.
About the Google tag:
Note: The global site tag (gtag.js) is now the Google tag. With this change, new and existing gtag.js installations will get new capabilities to help you do more, improve data quality, and adopt new features – all without additional code, WOW!!!!! I say.
The Google tag (gtag.js) is a single tag you can add to your website to use a variety of Google products and services. Instead of managing multiple tags for different Google product accounts, you can use the Google tag across your entire website and connect the tag to multiple destinations.
The Google tag lets you send data from your website to linked Google product destinations to help you measure the effectiveness of your website and ads. The Google tag is currently only accessible and configurable from Google Ads and Google Analytics 4.
How it works
Previously, you had to set up a global site tag (gtag.js). The global site tag has evolved into the Google tag.
Your Google tag (gtag.js) has a single tag ID you can add to your website to use a variety of Google products and services. Instead of managing multiple tags for different Google product accounts, you can use a single Google tag across your entire website and connect the tag ID to multiple destinations.
A new “Google tag” screen will replace the existing global site tag screens in Google Ads and Google Analytics, letting you access measurement features without adding code after the initial set-up. Changing settings in your Google tag will affect all associated destinations.
Benefits
- Multiple tags: If you have more than one tag installed on your website, you can choose to combine your Google tags to help you get better data and manage them in one place.
- Manage access: You can also now manage user access to your tag settings separately from access to your other products, giving you more control over who has access to change your critical measurement settings.
What’s changing
You’ll now see a new Google tag screen in your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts.
TAG DESTINATIONS
Every GA4 web stream and each Google Ads conversion will now be known as a Google Tag destination.
Each destination can be added to one, and ONLY ONE, Google Tag, one tag to rule them all eh.
You can remove a destination from its original Google Tag, and add it to another Google Tag.
This is useful if you want to prevent a destination from being controlled by its previous Google Tag.
At release time, the Google Tag is definitely geared towards enterprise use, as it’s larger companies with more varied data collection needs that would most benefit from consolidating multiple tags’ configurations into one single place in the admin infrastructure of Google’s more and more complicated tagging ecosystem.
some people are worried that the overlap between the Google Tag and the Global Site Tag will make the platform very complicated to use, but once you understand how the Google Tag is an administration feature and the Global Site Tag is the client-side component of the Google Tag, it should all start to make sense. Out of the box, the Google Tag lets you control what types of events can be automatically detected on a site, what cross-domain measurement settings to use across connected destinations, which users are able to view and modify the tag settings, and so forth.
Once you combine Google Tags (especially across tagging products like GA4 and Google Ads), you’ll really start to benefit and appreciate the features. At that point, Google Tag becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Here’s to one Manager to rule them all!.