Migrating to Google Tag Manager and Universal Analytics

Google Tag Manager and Universal Google Analytics

Here's more good information about using Google Tag Manager and the newest version of Google Analytics, called Universal Analytics. Both of these tools are great to use.

Google Tag Manager helps you manage snippets of tracking code on your website's pages and Universal Analytics can help you gather more insights about your website's visitors, which helps you know which parts of your website need more attention as well as a guide to help you know where to spend your ad dollars.

We're currently contacting our clients about doing this upgrade, so we wanted to publish an article explaining more about it.

Here is an article I posted at the end of last month:

Should You Upgrade Your Google Analytics Account to Universal Analytics? (webstix.com)

One way to more or less "future-proof" your website so that you don't have to keep updating the code is to use Google Tag Manager. You just implement this code once and then when there are changes, you just go into Google Tag Manager to change what your code does - whenever you want. You can even add non-Google tags (code) in there... pretty cool!

And then here's another good resource/article that you might find interesting:

Complete Guide To Universal Analytics – Should You Upgrade? (marketingland.com)

Benefits of Using Universal Google Analytics

Universal Analytics has many benefits over our usual Google Analytics:

1. Cross Device measurement: We will be able to connect with multiple devices with in-depth reports about their behavior. We can even see the path prior to their conversion for Mobile/Tablet/Desktop users. The reports will be like the Multi-Channel funnel report we have now but this will be for all devices.
2. Offline Conversions: We could not track offline actions untill now. These are actions like a phone call, a credit check or an in-person meeting. By saving the CID (customer ID) of the user when they first submitted their information (for example, in a car loan application), you can push a Google Analytics event, pageview, or any other hit through the new HTTP-based Measurement Protocol.
3. Remarketing: Using campaign management and AdWords, you can track users who have been toy our site already.
4. Advanced Segments for Visitors: We can focus on the actual visitor themselves rather than a website visit, allowing for conversions to be attributed to a visitor. In the Advance Segments section, you see a range of options like including filtering by user.
5. Set Up Custom Search Engines: Google Analytics could only recognize just the most popular search engines but with GTM, you can see all data sources without them being clumped in as being a search engine.
6. Demographics and Interest Report: The Demographics and Interest sections include Overview reports, along with new Age, Gender, and Interest Categories reports.
   1. They allow you to better understand who your users are.
   2. You can segment the rest of your Analytics data by these same characteristics so you can understand how converting and non-converting users differ (and many other such comparisons).
   3. These are the same demographics & interest categories used to target ads on the Google Display Network. Use these insights about your users to refine your ad campaign strategies.
   4. Not all of your users may have demographics associated with them, so these reports may only represent a subset of your users and may not be representative of your overall site composition.

In a nutshell, it pays to upgrade. You get a LOT more data about your website visitors and this can guide you with writing content along with your other marketing strategies.

Here's a good quote about advertising:

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." John Wanamaker

With more data, you can actually tell more about which advertising dollars are being spent well and which aren't.

It's a Two-Fer!

We're offering you a two-for-one deal on switching your website from Google Analytics to Universal Analytics along with also switching to Google Tag Manager as well.

If you're a current Webstix client (we have access to your website) and have Maintenance Blocks in your account, this update is just 2 Maintenance Blocks. If you are a new client, the cost is $195.

Contact us today about this great deal! or order it online now (to buy without using Maintenance Blocks).

-Tony