CXL Institute’s Digital Analytics mini-degree review — Part Five

I’m almost half-way on my educational journey with CXL Institute and their Digital Analytics minidegree. This was my fifth week studying it, and my second week spending some time with Google Tag Manager. I am currently watching the beginner course of Google Tag Manager with Chris Mercer, which I started the previous week so I’m going to continue summarizing what I learned during this week.

First of all, I have to say that I only had some very basic understanding of what Google Tag Manager is and what it can do before starting these courses, and after one week and a half, I already feel that I’ll get there and really understand how to extract value for me and my company utilizing this tool.

I took sometime to play around with the platform, and although I find my self overwhelmed and a little bit of curious of what I could achieve, I try to follow step by step what Chris Mercer is teaching me in order to avoid getting lost with all that information that’s available out there.

Now, let me continue the journey of what I’ve been learning this last week.

Getting to Know Google Tag Manager:

I had already started with the Getting to Know part of the course, where we learned the very basics of Google Tag Manager, such as Tags, Triggers, Variables and the Data Layer. We didn’t get into much detail, because we were going to dive deeper at the next part. Concluding the Getting to Know Google Tag Manager Part, Chris Mercer mentioned some best practices regarding the organizational structure of a Google Tag Manager account, some tips and information on how to use the Preview Mode and why and when is useful to test your tags and your implementations in a unique Workplace. Quick answer: When there are more than one person testing and working on Google Tag Manager.

After finishing the more introductory part of this beginner course, it was time for some more hands on training:

Getting Started — The First Tag and Scripts & Pixels

In this part of the course, we started getting our hands dirty. The first thing we did was create a page view tag for Universal Google Analytics. Its fairly easy to implement it and its the basic tag for Analytics in order to really start getting data from Tag Manager. It’s basically sends page view data to Google Analytics so Analytics can start storing information. And that was our first tag.

Continuing, Chris Mercer explains how we can implement pixels and scripts using Google Tag Manager. He gives us an example of Facebook Pixel setup and how easy it can be to implement it with the help of Google Tag Manager. And that is one of the most important “jobs” this platform does for Marketers. It’s actually the main reason a lot of people in marketing learn to use Google Tag Manager. There are a lot of built in tags for a lot of platforms, where it requires minimum effort from the user, such as Google Ads Standard Remarketing implementation. But Facebook Pixel is not available in Google Tag Manager yet. Chris Mercer though, shows us how easy it is to implement it with Google Tag Manager, and save time and effort from developers and marketers alike.

Tracking Engagement

Tracking engagement is the next part of the course. Engagement is one of the most important set of actions that marketers need to understand and measure, because it explains perfectly how the users are behaving and interacting with the website content. Tracking engagement means tracking specific behaviours and Chris Mercer gets in detail on how exactly we could measure them with the help of Google Tag Manager.

• Clicks: Tracking the most important clicks on your website.
• Scroll: Track when a user is scrolling and what percent of page did he/she scrolled
• Videos: Tracking view metrics that Google Analytics cannot understand by itself

Data Layer 101

Even though it is an 101 lesson, and that means introductory, it is really challenging. In this part of the course Chris Mercer does really start to get a little bit technical. During the course, you learn how to use the dataLayer.push method in order to send specific information to the data layer. Even though it had some basic Javascript, Chris Mercer explains exactly what you need to do in order to avoid being overwhelmed by these technical stuff. This maybe was the hardest part of the course so far (and I’m still at Beginner lessons), but I found it really exciting. I was actually waiting for that day to come, because one of the reasons I wanted to take this minidegree was to understand some more technical things that make the marketer’s job easier.

I have to mention here that things have changed a little bit. In the course the interface of preview mode where you can test your changes, is opening up right as you tell google tag manager to preview your changes and refresh your website’s page. As of June 2021 though, Google has introduced Tag Assistant. It’s almost the same thing, as the information you see is almost the same, but it can be a little intimidating at first because you see something a little bit different than what’s being shown at the video. It didn’t really made any difference up to now, and I hope it would not create any problems in the future of the course.

Summing up this week, I have to admit that things got a little bit harder for me, as I got introduced to a lot of concepts that were completely new to me. But it was the most exciting week also, because I’m finding exactly what I was expecting to when I was signing up for this course. I knew Google Tag Manager was a really powerful tool but as I’m diving deeper and deeper I find it really liberating to be able to understand what you want to track and just be able to track it, without having to rely on a developer who doesn’t really get the reason behind it.