It might be confusing to see this two different analytic tools by Google. When you need it, and why you need them? You’ll find the answers in this article.
Why do you need analytic tools?
If you’re having a website, potentially people visit it, and you want to know how people find your website, what they do on it. Am I right?
With the analytic tools we can see all these, but wait, Google offers actually two tools for that.
Which one to use?
Google Analytics collects a fair amount of data on its own, but Google Tag Manager helps to track custom events on your site. Please note, GTM does not replace Google Analytics using it on its own.
We always suggest connecting both to the website maximizing the collected data.
How they work?
We need to connect both analytic tools to our website. That happens by placing a tracking code on every page of the website. When something happens on the website, for example someone visits a page, the tracking code sends the correspondent data to the GA’s server. And later we see that data on our GA Dashboard.
What can I see in my analytics dashboard?
To give you a general idea about what we can track on the site:
- The countries they visit your website from
- The browser they use
- The device they use (desktop, mobile, etc.)
- Which pages are the most popular
- What they searched on your site for
- Where they came from: social media, other websites, your newsletter, etc.
- How many times they clicked on a specific button on your site
- How many times they added your products to the cart
And so much more!
Some of the data is automatically collected by GA, but whenever we need more information, we need to add custom tags.
All sites are different, therefore we always set up custom tracking system for each website.
Let’s wrap it up!
You should use both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to have a better analytics overview about your website. While some of the data already automatically collected by GA, you might need additional information. In this case GTM is a big help. We can set up custom tags to track custom events on your site.
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