What's Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager (GTM), which can be found here, is a free-to-use software provided by Google. It belongs to the Tag Management System (TMS) genre that helps website owners to add tracking and third-party scripts without the need to alter the website source code.

It can be used to track various events on the website, like adding a product to a cart, submitting a contact form or browsing a specific page. It can also be used to inject external scripts, tracking pixels, or custom HTML inside the pages at runtime.

Every action done by GTM (or any TMS for that matter), can be ruled by conditions: URL of the page, presence of a specific element in the page, the alue of a specific cookie, or trigger of a specific event.

Axeptio has ready-to-use integration with Google Tag Manager browser API, in a way that once the user approves or rejects inside our cookie widget, we dispatch custom events using the dataLayer variable. This dataLayer variable is a stack used by various Google Products (Google Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, etc.) to push and subscribe to events happening during the visitors' sessions.

Core concepts

What is a Tag

A tag is, eventually, a block of HTML code that will be injected into the webpage while the user is browsing it. They can be <script> tags, <img> tags for tracking pixels, <div> tags for presentation purposes, etc. But for the sake of user experience, Google also provides a curated list of templates, both from them and from the community that you can find using their wizard.

For a tag to be added to the web page, it needs to be told to. This is the role of triggers.

What is a Trigger

A trigger is something happening while the visitors are browsing or using the website. It can be one of the visitors' actions or an automated event. It can be something happening in a third party script like ours or a point reached in the website code.

The basic trigger is All Pages which is dispatched every time a page is loaded. The trigger type Axeptio uses extensively is the Custom Event type. It's a blank event, identified by a specific name, and it is able to contain Javascript data.

Triggers can be combined, and basic exception rules can be used to create complex triggering rules for tags.