Tracking behavior on a website or app requires a snippet of code. You then modify that code to identify whatever behavior you’d like to track, such as clicks, phone calls, form submissions or page views. Once the desired behavior is triggered, your tag (part of your code) fires and sends whatever data you’ve asked it to send to your data platform (often Google Analytics). A tag is basically data from your tracking code that gets sent somewhere when a user does something specific, or “triggers” it. The most common tag is a Page View, but you can create tags that trigger on almost any behavior. Tag management platforms like Google Tag Manager (GTM) are an evolution in how we build and manage tags. Using GTM, you simply place some code on your website one time and manage all your tags from a user friendly interface, rather than coding everything by hand. Now you can create, modify and test tags and triggers without a programmer. That said, GTM doesn’t remove the need for a skilled programmer. Unless you can write JavaScript or know where to look to get the information to build triggers for your tags there’s going to be a lot of data you simply won’t be able to track. The best setup is to have, or be, a skilled analyst that knows exactly what they want and can work quickly with a programmer to build tags/triggers.
