Keeping Pace With Global Site Tag (gtag.js)
It’s a touchy and frustrating job I have to admit because 6 months ago getting all scripts off your site for everything you had put them there for whether it was Analytics, Remarketing, Retargeting, Audience Profile Building, Adwords Conversion Tracking (the big one, yeah, where the real cash is at for digital marketers) and the list goes on, well, that was all the rage and all that Google wanted you to do.
Google Tag Manager
Which is really hard to find on Google Search, by the way. Search for Tag Manager, forget the Google bit or you will never find it. Tag Manager then allowed you to reconstruct all those scripts with a new easier method all inside Tag Manager, easier but with no instructional manual (those boys at Google, they really were total dorks, they always forgot to write the manuals for everything, Google technology is “manual-less” – even Google’s people say this is the case). Could you imagine getting a car without a manual, a computer, a TV without a manual? Get the biggest stick and bash your way through it. No, we can’t do that with Adwords.
While the new Global Site Tag (gtag.js) Google Universal Analytics is not extremely new, you know the script because it is clean, readable to the normal human eye, and is a lot smaller script with bigger explanations of what to with it are popping up everywhere.
It’s interesting to note that Global Site Tag (gtag.js) Analytic Tags and Adwords Conversion tags are now combined, they are the same tag, you just add the Analytics bit if you made it in Adwords and/or add the Adwords bit to your Analytics tag.
Think Adwords First
All those years getting all your ecommerce data out of Analytics has sort of gone to waste. Forget about it. Ecommerce data is definitely the domain of Adwords. Just wipe it clean and write it off. Analytics has other functions which I look at think it is the support deep sonar of Adwords. Now the script has been simplified to go into the header of all pages.
The second is the event script, say your post-sale thank you page, event script, very small and stick it in the above sometimes the tag or sometimes just after the (which is also conveniently in the header). You just want it only in that one header, not all headers. No big deal.
Now you are converting with Adwords. And that is a must. You might as well be floating in space without a conversion because Adwords for sure can’t tell the heck what is going on and how far you are away if you don’t have at least one point of reference.
Setting Up Any Website
The best way is to get right into each of the interfaces and follow the guides or search for help inside the interfaces because the plethora of results you will find elsewhere, which is always out of date is just going to make you crazy. Even Google says it is very hard to pass any of their exams no matter how much you study unless you have spent considerable time using the platforms.
What is the first thing you do once your site is or nearing completion? Before you do anything else, you can even do this in production?
As soon as your site is live or even before, you should focus on getting the right demographic customers, to at least visit your website – an excellent way to build up an audience profile even before you spend a cent on Adwords.
To do that, you should drop everything and make sure you have at least all of this setup.
- Verify your site with Search Console (do all 4 versions of your site, http://, http://www, https://, https://www)
- Install your Adwords Conversion Tracking Tag
- Install your Global Site Tag (gtag.js) Analytics Tag
- Add your Remarketing tracking tag
- Link Adwords to Analytics through AdWords
- Link your property’s Search Console to Analytics
- Link your property’s Search Console to AdWords
- Link your Youtube Channel to Adwords
- Scrub, remove duplicates, and lowercase all the emails your company has and create a .csv file for upload into your remarketing to create an awesome audience profile
- Put a warning on your site you are tracking with cookies
- Pat yourself on the back for sorting that out because now you have one of the most powerful data-sucking, tracking and analytical machines online that is available on the planet
Want Help?
Talk to us at RD. Whether you want to market to your neighbourhood, your suburb, a few suburbs, your region, your greater region, your state, all states, specific cities, the whole of Australia or the whole of the world, Adwords can work for you.