In this episode, Grace Puckett, Technology and Innovative Content Manager, interviews Jess Bergson, a consultant with Capacity Interactive and Master of Arts Management alum (CMU), to discuss Google Tag Manager. Learn what it is, how to implement it, and how it can increase data collection for your arts organization.

Transcript

[Intro Music]

Alyssa: Hello AMT Lab listeners, and welcome to an interview episode brought to you by the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Alyssa and I am the Podcast Producer. In this episode, our Technology and Innovative Content Manager, Grace Puckett, sat down with Jess Bergson, a consultant with Capacity Interactive and Master of Arts Management alum (CMU). They will talk about what Google Tag Manager is, how to implement it, and how it can help your organization. We hope you enjoy this interview, brought to you by AMT Lab.

[Musical Interlude]

Grace: So Jess, thank you so much for sitting down with me today and chatting. For our listeners, my name is Grace and I am the Innovative-, excuse me, the Technology and Innovative Content Manager. I always like to flip those. [laughter]

Jess, if you don't mind, would you introduce yourself and just give us a little bit of background as to who you are and what you're doing?

Jess Bergson: Yeah, sure. Hi, everyone, hi AMT Lab listeners. My name is Jess Bergson, I am an Analytics Consultant at Capacity Interactive. I'm also the former Chief Editor of Interactive Content, I think that's what my title was at AMT Lab, so I'm very excited to be here today, talking to Grace.

Grace: Thank you. Um, so what are you…. One of the reasons that I asked you to sit down today is that we are noticing, when it comes to setting up websites and tracking the kind of customer flow, there's this new wonderful thing - it's not so new, but new to me - called Google Tag Manager. I was wondering if you might be able to describe what that is, and how that might relate to web design and management itself.

Jess: Yeah, sure. So, before kind of explaining what Google Tag Manager is, I think that in order for us to understand it fully, we kind of need to first understand the history of tracking things in marketing and in the digital world overall. So back before Google Tag Manager existed, I think that it came out in like 2014, maybe - don't quote me on that. [Laughter] But before Google tag manager came out, the way that we would track people's actions on a website, for platforms like Facebook, or Google Analytics, or the Google Display Network, was through a pixel. So, what a pixel is, is essentially just a piece of code that you would add to your website, or you would ask your developer to add to your website, and pass back specific information to whatever platform you were working with. So, for example, if you wanted to track um, purchases in Google Analytics, you would send an email to your developer, you would copy and paste the pixel that you get from Google Analytics itself.

Grace: Okay

Jess: And then you would paste that into the email to your developer and essentially say, “Hey, Greg, hope all as well, please see below for the Google Analytics transaction tag, or pixel”.

Grace: Okay

Jess: “Please populate the code with the products that were purchased and the revenue and the product ID, etc.

Grace: That sounds like a lot of steps. [laughter]

Jess: It does sound like a lot of steps. Not only was it a lot of steps, but it also required a lot of back and forth. It required kind of taking the control of marketing, tracking, and putting it in the hands of our website developers whose job really is to be helping us build the website and maintain it, but not necessarily do our tracking for marketing platforms.

Grace: Ah, okay.

Jess: So, enter Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager - again, I think it came out in 2014, or something like that, maybe it's 2012 - and what Google Tag Manager does is it essentially removes our need from having to go through that tedious back and forth with a developer to place tracking on the website. It's literally just a website, Google Tag Manager, so, it's something that you can log into just like you would log into Google Drive or your Gmail account. You login with Google credentials and you basically have the potential in your Google Tag Manager account to place all those pixels and tracking or tags. So pixel equals the same thing as tag, tracking code, they're all just the same thing.

So, the way that Google Tag Manager works is rather than placing individual pixels, on the back end of the website with your developer, what you do is you remove all that individual tracking, and you replace it with one piece of code, which is called the Google Tag Manager container tag. You get that piece of code from your Google tak-, Tag Manager account or container and you paste that on the backend of your website, and now you're kind of connected to your account. So, once you paste that code on every page of your website, you essentially have the power to be placing all these tracking pixels and tags yourself. As long as you have access to your Google credentials, you have the power to build different tags in GTM.

Because Google Tag Manager is a Google product, it works really well with other Google products. So, if you create a Google account, and a Google Tag Manager account and go in there, you'll see that the different tags that you can build, there are many of them but the easiest ones to build are the Google related ones. So Google Analytics, Google ads, Google double click - all of these are really, really simple and easy forms of tracking to add. It's really user friendly, so when you're building a tag in there, it's kind of just looks like a form that you're filling out and it'll prompt you for different information that you need for different platforms, and different types of tags. So, a page view tag versus a transaction tag…and yeah, I can talk through the different elements and makeup Google Tag Manager, but that's essentially what it is. It's, it's not collecting any data, but it's a tool for us to put tracking in place and it puts the control in the hands of the marketer rather than our developers.

Grace: So taking out the middleman for that, and maybe streamlining that a little bit more, I think that's something that we're starting to see with technology being used in the arts, is trying to-, how can we streamline those processes, making it not only easier, but potentially, maybe less expensive?

Jess: Oh, yeah. So that's the other important thing about Google Tag Manager is that it's free!

Grace: Oh, yay, we like free!

Jess: Yes! So, most Google products, the majority of like the Google Suite, in terms of the marketing Google Suite, the most of them are free and Google Tag Manager is one of those.

Grace: That’s lovely!

Jess: Yes.

Grace: So, when considering Google Tag Manager, what is the process  - and I know that we said there's that the piece of code, um, the container, - the process of implementing that into a current website, is that again, just regurgitating what you just said? You just go in and you paste that container on every single page?

Jess: Yeah, exactly. So, when you create a new Google Tag Manager container, that's when they're called. So, there's an account and then with within an account, there's a container.

Grace: Okay?

Jess: The container is just where you put all of your tracking on for your website. So, once you-, once you put-, once you create a container, it'll prompt you to place that piece of code on your site, and it will actually give you instructions. Um, so there are two different pieces of code that you need to place on every page of your website, like you said. It's very important that that piece of code gets placed on all pages with the website.

Grace: Okay.

Jess: Because if it doesn't, you're blind to that page and Google Tag Manager. You can’t-, like any tracking that you put into the container, it's only going to be applicable to the pages on your website where the container code is placed.

Grace: Okay, that's-, that's a really good bit of information, especially because I'm thinking in terms of when you have websites that maybe have a good amount of information, maybe considering AMT Lab’s website specifically, the way that we have it set up if you're not tagging or if there's a particular page or a blog role that's not tagged properly, being able to track that would be almost impossible, correct?

Jess: Yeah, exactly. So, for example, if we were trying to implement Google Tag Manager on AMT Lab’s website and we only put the GTM container code on the homepage, and then within the GTM account we built Google Analytics page view tracking, the only page that will show up in Google Analytics will be the homepage. So basically, anywhere you want tracking, you need the GTM container code down, and it's a best practice in the industry to put it on every single page.

Grace: That was going to be my next question, if you could consider that to be a best practice for any organization, not just an arts organization.

Jess: Yeah, every organization. So, really any website, GTM should be placed on every page of the site. Now, it is important if you're shifting from kind of the old form of, of putting down pixels and tags before GTM existed, where you have all this tracking hard coded on your website…

Grace: Right

Jess: If you're shifting from that to GTM, you need to make sure that if you're moving a form of tracking into Google Tag Manager that you remove it from the backend of your site, because otherwise you're going to end up double counting.

Grace: So, thinking on that line, would, would someone be able to use Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics at the same time? Can those to be integrated because it's on the Google platform? And on that same vine, if someone's using something other than Google Analytics, plus Google Tag Manager, would those-, would that be where you have your double counting that you're talking about?

Jess: Yeah, so I think that this is something that confuses a lot of people about GTM and Google Analytics and, and kind of thinking about like what each of those platforms’ roles are. So, Google Analytics, the way I think about Google Analytics is it's the platform where we send all of our data. We send all of our data about the website to Google Analytics and once it gets there, Google Analytics sorts it into all the different reports. So we have audience reports that tell us about who's on the website; acquisition reports, which tells us about where those people are coming from; behavior repor-, reports, which tell us about what people are doing on the site; and then conversion reports, which tell us what actions they're doing. So that's Google Analytics. Google Tag Manager is the tool that we can use to actually send all of that data. So, it’s the mechanism for sending data to either Google Analytics or Facebook, or any other platforms that we're working with.

Grace: So really and truly, both of those systems are using, or at least handling, the same kind of data. It's how-,  what they do with it that's different.

Jess: Yeah. So yeah, so I would say that the GTM…, I was, I don't know if I would say that GTM is handling data, I think that I would say that it is… GTM is a place where we can kind of host all of our tracking. So, it's just the home for all of our code, all of our tracking code essentially. It doesn't appear in the form of code when you're in GTM itself, which is the nice thing about it. It's more accessible,-

Grace: Especially for those of us who are non-coders quite yet.

Jess: Exactly, exactly. So, you know, we don't go to Google Tag Manager to like analyze how the websites performing.

Grace: Okay.

Jess: We go to Google Tag Manager when we to add additional tracking for Google Analytics to track something about the website or we go to Google Tag Manager if we need to add additional tracking for Facebook campaign that we we're running.

Grace: Ah, okay. So, thinking about all of what off is offered by Google Analytics, why would an organization - arts or otherwise - want to implement GTM, on top of the data that they're already getting to see with Google Analytics specifically? I mean, what would you recommend being able to look at specifically with that?

Jess: Yeah, sure. So, the reason wh-, the real plus, the real advantage to using Google Tag Manager is that it makes it - what we were talking about before - it makes it much easier for marketers to write and control up their tracking.

Grace: Okay.

Jess: Let's say about like, you need to change a configuration on your page view tag, maybe your organization just went through a rebranding and your website domain name has changed. So, it changed from like, “artsorganization.org” to like “artsorg.org”. In that case, you might need to change some of your tracking, because oftentimes our tracking is built off of the page URL. So, in that case, rather than having to go to our developer and put in that request to change all of our tracking, we will be able to do it ourselves through Google Tag Manager. So that's one of the advantages of it. The other advantage is we have the ability to do some more advanced tracking through GTM than we may have been able to do otherwise on our own. For example, one of the things that is kind of one of the more unknown features about Google Analytics, or unused features about Google Analytics, is that we can actually track information about what people are clicking on the site. So, we can track whether someone is clicking the main navigation or opening up a mobile menu. We can track if someone's playing video, um, we can track if someone's scrolling down a page.

Grace: Oh, okay.

Jess: And all of that type of tracking is really hard to do in the old for-, in the pixel placement form of, of tracking for the website. It's much easier to do in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, excuse me, because GTM has the ability to listen for a lot of those actions on the website. So, it could listen for when someone's clicking on something or playing a video or scrolling down the page. It can detect that and then you can kind of tell it to send that information to Google Analytics when that happens.

Grace: So, it's more-, it sounds like it's more in depth with activity on specific pages and not just what button are they clicking to get through to certain things because I think, at least from how I have-, what little I know from Google Analytics, you can see kind of where people are going in terms of the linear mode, but maybe this is getting more into that gray area of what are they actually doing on the page itself.

Jess: Exactly, exactly.

Grace: Okay.

Jess: So, Google Analytics, we like to call it “out of the box”. So, like when you have a brand spanking new Google Analytics account, “out of the box” Google Analytics can do a lot. It can tell you what pages people are viewing, the demographics of those users, where they're coming from. So, are they coming from social or email or organic search? It can tell you if they're new or returning visitor, it can tell you - if you have it configured - what they're purchasing on the website. But, if you think about our websites, even AMT Lab’s website, but, but also especially arts organizations’ websites, there's tons of things that our patrons can be doing on the website that go beyond just viewing a page, right?

Grace: Right.

Jess: If we think about an arts organization’s event detail page, oftentimes on those pages there will be a video, there will be an image gallery, there will be maybe audio for people to play, those pages might be really long so we might want to know if someone's scrolling down that page... All of these things, Google Analytics is blind to “out of the box”.

Grace: Oh, okay.

Jess: So, if you want to know, those types of things, which are really valuable when you're trying to understand how the website is really performing and how specific templates are performing, how people are navigating across the say, um, that tracking is really required. And I would say that very few arts organizations have that tracking in place. It does require a little bit more of a technical expertise. Using a tool like Google Tag Manager makes it a lot easier to be able to implement some of those things, but there's sometimes is additional coding within Google Tag Manager that's required to get specifically what you're looking for.

Grace: Okay. So, thinking on it from the technical side, as well as from the management, since we're talking about the fact that GTM can give you that more in depth view, how would someone maybe go about implementing GTM within their web design to optimize a viewer’s experience and make sure that people are moving the way that the organization wants them to, um, thinking specifically of just even the event pages that you were mentioning? You know, are is there certain information maybe that someone's missing, and can an organization identify that? I mean, would you say that, maybe something along those lines?

Jess: Yeah, that's a great question. So,  I think that the ideal approach here is to you know, if you're starting brand new with this, let's say that you don't have GTM on your website and you can kind of want to get to a place of being able to look at some of this more, um, customized data that I've been talking about. To me, the steps are this: Number one, you need to get that GTM container code on your website. So ,create a new GTM account, if you don't have one already, paste that code on every page of your website. From there, you're going to need to spend some time building that tracking, you might need to consult an outside vendor to do that for you, um, depending on your expertise with the subject matter, some of it you could kind of Google and figure it out, but I will say that there definitely are pieces of it that require a lot of expertise with the platform. From there, you let your data collect in Google Analytics. So, once you've built all built all your tracking and identified what you care about tracking in GTM, you publish all that tracking, the data gets sent to Google Analytics, and It starts collecting.

Grace: Okay.

Jess: So from the time that you push all that tracking live, the data will start collecting, and then you can analyze it. So, you go into Google Analytics, you take a look at the things that you're interested in, so I think that oftentimes, we collect so much data and we don't know where to start. I recommend using your data to help you prioritize, so what I mean by that is, you know, look at all the pages that people are viewing on the site, determine what the most popular sections of the website are, where the most popular templates of the website are. An example of a template would be an event detail page - that's likely going to be one of the more important templates on the site. From there, use your event tracking, the interaction tracking that we've been talking about, that you have tracked and sent to Google Analytics to dig into user behavior deeper. So, ask questions, depending on your specific website: If you have lots of videos on that page, are people playing the video? When they play the video are they more likely to purchase on the site? How far down are people scrolling? What are the top things that people are clicking on on that page? How many people are exiting on that page without taking further action?

So, all these things are just some examples of questions that we just start to ask and ultimately, you are looking to take action, so that-, taking action can look like a couple of different things. We might realize on our event detail page that-, um, let's see a good example… let's see… So, we might realize on our event detail pages that not many people are playing video. And when we look at the event detail page, we have to kind of hypothesize why that may be. Do people just not care about the video or is there something else that might be holding them back? And in this particular example, and I'm thinking of a real a real example that I've seen, maybe those videos are really far down the page and users may not be making it there. So, we can look at something like scrolled up tracking to determine if people are actually seeing it, if they're, if they're making it to that point of the page. And if we determine that they're not, then maybe we can start thinking about the hierarchy of the page and, you know, maybe we need to move those videos up and make them a little bit more visible. So, things like that.

I would say that another thing that we should be considering doing depending on how much traffic our website gets is AB testing. AB testing is essentially the process of taking the original version of a web page, changing one thing about it, so that could be like something as simple as simple as the color of a button, um, or it can be, you know, like pinning a button to the bottom of the screen. It could be all different sorts of things. But the bottom line is we changed one thing about the web page, we use a tool like Google Optimize, which is another free Google platform, to send half of our traffic to the original version of the page, and then half of our traffic to the altered version of the page where we’ve made the one tiny change, whether it's a button color, whatever else it is. And then we run that for a couple weeks and we analyze the results. So, we look at, you know, which version were people more likely to click on that button, or how like, which version were people more likely to purchase. We do that to declare a winner. So, either our original version or our new version will win and if our new version wins, then we can implement that change.

Grace: Right.

Jess: So, it's a way to essentially prove that we are going to make an impact before we invest in redesigning something about a template.

Grace: So, it's like troubleshooting certain pages and seeing what does and doesn’t work.

Jess: Kind of, yeah.

Grace: And trying to figure out exactly where that disconnect might be happening with first, between your viewers and the page itself.

Jess: Yeah, I don't know if I would say that it's troubleshooting so much as just testing something out, trying something new and seeing what the results are. It's pretty cool.

Grace: No, it sounds fascinating. I'm learning more and more as we're sitting here today. Even Google Optimize that new tool for me, I'm going to have to look that one up.

Jess: Yeah, not many people know about it. And I think that AB testing is definitely a big opportunity for the sector. The tricky thing about it is you do need a good amount of traffic in order to do it, um, just because you don't want an AB test running too long, and you need to reach statistical significance in order to depend on a winner. So there's lots of statistics involved in B testing, which I am definitely not an expert in, I use a lot of Google's help to educate myself on that, but yeah, it's a-, it's a good thing to kind of shoot for as a more advanced version of web optimization.

Grace: Okay. I-, I guess just to close this out, um, when thinking of how an arts organization who may be, you know, with a lot of arts organizations being nonprofits, budget is super high focus, high priority, on with GTM for the most part – well GTM itself is free… Is there something, and I know that we said yes, you should implement it, but, um, in terms of trying to understand how a specific program might be functioning in terms of traffic from website to actual person being on the site, if that is something that's going on, would you say that GTM could potentially help understand whether or not web traffic is resulting in actual business? Or is that-

Jess: Do you mean like in-person visits, or just purchases?

Grace: Kind of, yeah, someone who maybe sees-, is maybe, you know, comes across the website does a little bit of digging maybe and then actually shows up? Is that something that GTM can at least help understand and help analyze that transition, um, considering that it gives you that in depth view?

Jess: Well, so GTM wouldn't be able to help you understand if someone visited the organization. There is a new feature in Google Analytics that, I think it's called store visits, um, where essentially they are able to tell if someone like visited your organization.

Grace: Okay.

Jess: I don't know that I would vouch for it, I think it's still in beta. Um, but that might be a feature coming down the line. I also think that you need there are certain requirements, I think you technically need like more than one location, which wouldn’t apply to most arts organizations, and probably like a certain number of traffic coming to you in person and online. What you can do in Google Analytics, and you can set up this tracking through Google Tag Manager, is you can track purchases. So, depending on what ticketing platform you're working with, this can be easier for some way rather than others. I'll say that Tessitura’s T-New, their kind of out of the box ticketing platform, is very easy to implement this with. There’s some others as well, some are a little bit harder. But you can implement tracking to understand when people are purchasing on the website, which is a good indication for someone coming to the site. So yeah, you can do that track-, you build that tracking through Google Tag Manager and once you do, you'll see it start to collect in the E-Commerce reports in Google Analytics.

Grace: And just to-, one final question, if someone has been using Google Analytics already, and they decided to put our implement GTM within their Google Suite, are there any issues that might happen? You know, how long would you wait to start seeing that data from GTM be pushed into Google Analytics? What's that particular process like, just for people who are already using Analytics and maybe want to add this into what they're looking at?

Jess: Yeah, sure. So, if you create a new Google Tag Manager account and a container, you put that code on your website on every page, um, by itself is not going to do-, like just out of the box like that it's not going to do anything. The only way that Google Tag Manager is going to start sending, tracking, sending page view behavior, or different interactions, or purchasing behavior to Google Analytics, or any other platform, is if you build a tag in the Google Tag Manager container. So, there are three different elements of GTM: There's a tag, a trigger, and a variable. The tag is essentially like the pixel, it's like a piece of code that needs to connect to the platform. The trigger attaches to the tag and that's your logic in Google Tag Manager when you tell the tag where it should be firing.

Grace: Okay.

Jess: So, if we're building tracking specifically for our event detail pages, the trigger will be something, like, you know where the page URL contains slash events slash performances, or something like that. Um, the variable is kind of like, it's extra information, building blocks. So it’d be things like, you know, the page path that someone's on, or the page URL or the product that someone's purchasing. Without all those things, so without some tags and triggers and variables built out in the platform, Google Tag Manager isn't going to do anything. It's just going sit there.

Grace: And that's the technical bit you were talking about earlier.

Jess: Yeah. So that's, that's a bit of like actually building things. Some tags are more technical to build than others and some triggers are more technical to build than others, it kind of just depends on what you're trying to do. But essentially, once you build out the tags and triggers and variables that you want to build in your container, it's still not going to do anything, it's not going to send anything to Google Analytics or any platforms, until you publish it. So, there’s a button in there that you have to press publish. Once you hit publish, that tracking is live, you can think of it that like, once you hit publish, you have essentially like, taking the place of your developer and put those pixels or tags on your website.

Grace: Okay.

Jess: And at that point, your tracking will start to send to Google Analytics or other platforms that you've built for and that's when you need to start paying attention to, you know, if anything has gone wrong. So at that point, what I would do is I would go into Google Analytics, I would go to the real time reports, which tell us what people are doing on our website literally right now in this moment, and make sure that like, data is still coming through. You'll also want to make sure that you're not double tracking anything. So, once you publish tags in GTM, those tags, that tracking, now lives on your website. And if that same tracking is also hard coded on your website, you have it down twice.

Grace: Got it.

Jess: You definitely want to avoid having like, two Google Analytics page view tags down on your website, because then you'll just be double counting every visit to your site, which has a whole lot of problems tied to it.

Grace: That would get really confusing really fast.

Jess: Yes. So, there is a potential to kind of break your account when you're doing this transition, but I would say that, you know, just use, you know, use your logic and just look at the backend of the website and say, “Okay, do I have a Google Analytics page u tag pasted on the back end of the website? No? Okay, great. Do I have it in my Google Tag Manager container? And is it published? Yes. Is my Google Tag Manager container code down on every single page of the website? Yes.” Then you're probably in good shape.

Grace: Well, that is good to know. [Laughter] Especially as the publish button, if you don't hit that it doesn't sound like it does anything.

Jess: Yeah. And that trips a lot of people up, I think that it could be you know, this big feat to build all this tracking in the platform and then you're like, “I did it!”, and it's not actually on, on your website.

Grace: You’d just sit around on thinking, “where is this data I thought I was going to be gathering?” [Laughter]

Jess: The other good thing to know about Google Tag Manager is it is possible to test it out before you publish it.

Grace: Oh!

Jess: So, there's like a preview version where you can actually go to your website and see a little screen that tells you what tags that you've built are firing on different pages.

Grace: I see… that’s helpful!

Jess: So, I definitely recommend doing that before publishing anything. And again, I think that, you know, if you are unclear about how all this works, or it just makes you want to, you know, have to breathe really deeply and heavily, um, there are lots of resources out there online and there are also people that you can consult on this if you want to do something a little bit more advanced.

Grace: Okay. Well, Jess thank you so much for sitting down with me again and talking myself and our listeners through the very basics, I’m sure, of Google Tag Manager and how it relates to web design and Google Analytics. So, thank you very much for taking time out of your day!

Jess: You’re welcome!

Grace: Appreciate it!

Jess: Of course!

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Thanks for listening to the Arts Management and Technology Lab podcast series. You can read more on the intersection between the arts and technology at www.amt-lab.org. Or, you can listen to more interviews and discussions and our podcast series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.

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