Top Conversion Optimisation Company Australia 2023

Measure All Your Website Interactions with Google Tag Manager

If you’re not currently measuring all the metrics that matter to your business website, especially those that are making you money or generating leads, how can you understand what is working and what isn’t? Your ability to measure and understand how people interact with your website is key to improving your online presence and generate more leads and sales. Setting up advanced tracking of button clicks, form submissions and embedded video interactions (to name a few) used to be an excessively difficult task, but Google Tag Manager has changed the game so that even small business so even small business can take advantage of the benefits without spending a tonne of money.

 

What Is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a game changer for online marketers and their clients because it provides a secure means to deploy tags of code to websites in real time based on visitor interactions remotely. In other words, marketing tags can be triggered on your website without the need to manually write the code directly on your website. All the code needed on your website for GTM to work properly is to place a small code snippet called GTM Container Code on all your web pages and the rest is set up within the Google Tag Manager interface.

 

Faster, Flexible Marketing Tags Without Breaking Your Website

For marketing teams with a GTM expert, a lot of time is saved on setting up advanced tracking of interactions on websites since times past when we needed to get access to the website code and embed tags everywhere. Even worse, marketers would have to provide the code to embed on the website to developers and get the changes approved and tested, taking weeks or even months to get marketing tags deployed.  All the delays to getting the right tracking implemented can add up to huge opportunity costs, especially if you have time sensitive advertising campaigns. GTM solves that problem, making the process of setting up advanced tracking of website interactions faster and more flexible by allowing the marketing team to avoid getting bogged down with website code access and possibly breaking your website.

 

So What Interactions Can We Measure and Why Should You Care?

Most website owners track page views using Google Analytics with maybe a goal being set on the “Thankyou” page that visitors who fill out a form are redirected to.

That’s good enough right? Unfortunately, this method can have some drawbacks: 

  • If people land on the thankyou page somehow without filling in the form, it will still be recorded as a conversion or goal.
  • If you don’t block search engines from crawling the thankyou page, it can be indexed in search results bringing direct traffic to that page resulting in massive over reporting of conversions.
  • You can’t measure anything else of significance other than page views.
  • Difficult to differentiate multiple forms in reporting

With GTM, the possibilities for measuring interactions is enormous and just about anything a visitor can do on your website can be reported in real time within Google Analytics or third party website traffic reporting platforms. These interactions can also be tracked for online advertising platforms such as AdWords, Bing, Facebook and many more.

 

Accurately Measure Form Interactions

First things first: that contact form on your website with page views being tracked as a goal can go in the bin and get replaced with an “Event” style tracker that only reports successful form submissions. Unsuccessful form submissions that generated a missing field error and form abandonment can be detected in real time with the appropriate metrics and dimensions reported. It is also possible to capture and report the contents of specific form fields when the form is submitted. Google’s terms and conditions make it clear that personally identifiable information should not be captured and reported using GTM and doing so would also create a big legal liability so it is important to avoid doing this. Field capture of non-personally identifiable information can be very helpful to marketing though, for example capturing and reporting the suburb of the form filler so that you can see the numbers of people who completed the form in different areas. The field content of radio buttons and drop down lists can also be captured and reported as dimensions using GTM.

Here is a short summary of form tracking options:

  • Successful form submission
  • Track multiple forms separately
  • Unsuccessful form submissions (error messages)
  • Skipped vs completed fields
  • Form abandonment
  • Capture and report specific field content

 

Clicks, Clicks & More Clicks!

If someone can click it, we can measure it! It is always useful to track those prominent call-to-action buttons with the “CLICK HERE” or “CONTACT US” message prompting the visitor to take the next step. Once you are tracking and collecting data on how many people are clicking that money button, making changes and testing for better results is made possible. Knowing something as simple as how many people clicked on a button or other web element can be powerful stuff, which many of your competitors are not even thinking about. Call-to-Action buttons are one of the top elements of a web page to experiment with to gain higher conversion rates using split-testing, but the first step is being able to collect and report the actionable data needed to test the response.

Tracking clicks without GTM is a nightmare without GTM, where we would basically have to add code to every element and link we want to track on the website manually. With GTM a click “listener” script is run and we can set up triggers for specific types of clicks and report them as Goals or Events in Google Analytics.

Here are some common click types tracked as Goals: 

  • File Downloads
  • Email Links
  • Telephone Links
  • Add to Cart Buttons
  • Instant Chat Box Opening

 

Here are some common click types tracked as Events: 

  • Call-to-Action buttons
  • Video Plays/Pause/Play to End
  • Podcast Plays/Pause/Play to End
  • External Links
  • Internal Links
  • Social share buttons
  • Menu links
  • Image gallery controls and image enlargement

There really is no limit to how these can be labelled for reporting. It really comes down to identifying the clicks that are important and categorising them in a way that makes sense from a business point of view.

 

GA Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking

If you have an ecommerce website that sells directly to the public, GTM can make it easy to integrate Google Analytics’ Enhanced Ecommerce tracking with many website platforms. The easiest that this writer has found for integration is WordPress with Woocommerce. If your website ecommerce platform has a Google Tag Manager plugin that automatically integrates GTM with your ecommerce, then there shouldn’t be any problems. If not, it will take hours and hours of web developer time adding Google Analytics code to all the ecommerce pages.

If you are fortunate enough to get Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce tracking enabled on your website, you and your marketing team will be able to collect a wealth of useful interaction metrics on your product, shopping cart and checkout pages. This data is extremely useful to the marketing team for understanding customer behaviour on an ecommerce website, including cart abandonment rates, identifying any problems with the checkout process and improving the customer experience.

 

Hover Events, Timing, Scroll Tracking & Anything Else

But that’s not all! Like I said, if you can do it on a website, it can be tracked and reported using GTM. You can track mouse hovers over specific web elements, or even generate heat maps to show areas where the mouse pointer gravitates to most. Blog pages can have timer events record a Goal or Event when the user has spent a certain amount of time on a page. This type of event/goal would indicate a certain level of engagement with an article for example. With GTM, we can even track and report how far a visitor has scrolled down a page, reporting the percentage of total scroll took place per web session.

With a GTM expert on board, all this and more is possible!

 

Will It Slow Down My Website?

Not to any significant degree no. The GTM container code is asynchronous javascript, meaning that it doesn’t take up much resources to execute the code which is executed remotely by Google. It will also wait until the page is loaded by the user before firing tags.

 

Where Are All the Google Tag Manager Experts?

As ground breaking, time and money saving as Google Tag Manager is, it may be surprising to note that far less than a majority of marketing agencies, let alone websites, are taking advantage of this technology. They are missing out on marketing opportunities by not having the most important data at their fingertips; visitor interaction data. There is a huge whole in their knowledge of how people actually use their website and in many cases, not even knowing how effective their advertising is. A major reason the advertising industry moved to the Internet was because on the Internet the value of advertising can be empirically measured. While the adoption of GTM is rapidly growing, the gap in knowledge of how to take advantage of its potential is not closing fast enough for many businesses who demand deeper insights into marketing campaign performance.

 

Discuss Your Website Interaction Tracking Requirements with Business Assist

Business Assist has been adopted GTM and began provisioning advanced tracking methods for our marketing clients for more than two years now. This has helped many businesses to measure the kinds of metrics that were previously prohibitive in cost to implement. If you have either basic tracking or no tracking for your website, talk to a Business Assist representative on (03) 9005 2233 to discuss your requirements.

 

What Is Google Tag Manager?

It provides a secure means to deploy tags of code to websites based on visitor interactions remotely. In other words, marketing tags can be triggered on your website without the need to manually write the code directly on your website.

What can be tracked with Google Tag Manager?

You can track form interactions, clicks, file downloads, telephone links, add to cart clicks, chat box openings, video plays, podcast plays, link clicks, social shares, image views and more!

What is the difference between GTM and Google Analytics?

Google Tag manager allows you to deploy tags of code remotely, it is not a reporting software. Google Analytics provides reports and data on the performance of your website.

Do I need to have Google Tag Manager?

No, but it can be really beneficial when used correctly.

Share this:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Free 25 Page eBook

Download the Influencing Your Digital Marketing Metrics ebook

Growth in numbers translates to growth in business, learn about the digital marketing KPI’s that can dramatically boost your business trajectory.

Free 25 Page eBook

Download the Influencing Your Digital Marketing Metrics ebook

Growth in numbers translates to growth in business, learn about the digital marketing KPI’s that can dramatically boost your business trajectory.

Where to from here?

Related Blog Posts

There’s always more to learn when it comes to digital marketing, continue learning about it by clicking on one of our blogs here

Here's what our clients say

Book Your Digital Strategy Session

Free 45 Minute Digital Strategy Session

We’ll get in touch with you to arrange a time for your session and gain some initial background on your business needs

What you'll get

Website Audit

A strategic look at your website from the inside and out conducted by one of our senior digital strategist’s

Industry Strategies

An insiders view of what unique strategies work for similar businesses in your industry and how you can capitalise on these learnings

Spy on your competitor’s

A sneak-peak at what your competitors are doing online

Success framework

A digital marketing success framework tailored to your business

Niki Patterson

Business Assist help us with the growth of our business, which is what every business wants, and also it really feels like everyone on the team understands and knows your business well. It’s not just one person, everyone is somehow involved and I appreciate that. Thank you so much for all your hard work in fixing our campaigns. We are all incredibly appreciative.

Jo McMillan

Business Assist were a pleasure to work with as we developed our new website. They were responsive, considered and always sought to provide us with the best possible product at a competitive price. We are very happy with the website they produced for us and have had a lot of positive comments on it. Business Assist is also great with follow up and ongoing support, should we need it.

Dean Burns

We only launched Rent Busters Perth in November 2018, so it is incredible that Business Assist generated over 500 leads for us in June 2020!  They helped us with our branding, market positioning and have since worked very closely with us on developing new offers, headings and campaigns every month. And most importantly we are signing a record number of deals every month!

Business Assist are more like our business partner than supplier and we heavily rely on their expertise and the results they deliver are extraordinary – I can’t recommend them more highly.

Lisa Bywaters

We’ve been working with Steve and the team at Business Assist since 2010.  With an information dense website it’s vital for us that our visitors find the information they need, when they need it. The BA team understand that people search for information in an organic way, that it’s not a linear process. By using their expertise, we now have a friendly, welcoming website that allows visitors to find the information they need quickly and easily. They were also extremely helpful when we transitioned to our new name and new website – with everything from developing a new website that incorporated consumer and staff feedback, to developing an SEO strategy and Google Ads campaigns that helped us retain our past users and attract new ones. They’re a professional, friendly team that takes the time to get to know the needs of your organisation and your website users.

Tony Raunic

A few years ago Hunt & Hunt Lawyers decided to put more resources into our SEO.  We interviewed a number of contractors who all promised their services would be superior.  We were struck by Steve Foura and his team’s preparedness to invest time in learning about what was distinctive about our business and what we particularly wanted to achieve.

We appointed Business Assist to focus on SEO improvements for aspects of our property team marketing including our compulsory acquisition advisory services.

The results have been outstanding with web-based enquiries growing exponentially and, critically, the right prospective clients contacting us and invariably converting into fee paying clients.

We certainly recommend Business Assist highly for any professional services business looking to better leverage its internet presence.

Ultimately, Hunt & Hunt asked Business Assist to develop a new website for our national legal group and we are very pleased with the results.

We continue to work with Business Assist today across various teams as we derive great value from Steve’s practical layman’s advice on SEO.  Business Assist also understand our business and genuinely seem to go the extra mile to add value.

Robert Thorpe

It felt that our previous digital agency was not very engaged with our business – there was a real disconnect.  With Business Assist we feel like we’re talking to the people who are actually implementing the campaign, or at least have a very good understanding of it.  We believe this is one of the main  reasons we saw results happen straightaway – increased new customer inquiries from Australia and overseas. But the other thing we get is great advice from Business Assist about things we can and can’t do from a Digital Marketing perspective. We trust really these guys. The other thing we’re getting is the changes we’re asking to make or services we’re changing, it happens really fast – there’s nothing like a 2 week period of waiting.

Amanda Greer

We’re a small business but we try and behave like a bigger company and Business Assist help us lift that bar. They have helped us get ahead of our competitors. We have a strategy meeting soon where we will develop a 5 year plan and we look forward to Business Assist’s input and planning what we should be working with them on for the next 5 years.  Business Assist have a  really good personable team and they tailor to us – we really like the flexibility. We’re very strategic in what we do and Business Assist helps us enhance our competitive advantage by reacting to opportunities quickly. Our position, interests and needs are well aligned.

Dave Porter

Business Assist are responsible for our new leads coming in. Increasingly, we are becoming more and more reliant on digital marketing as the other avenues are either too expensive or deliver little or no return. So we are extremely reliant on Business Assist.  And they have delivered for us for many years and continue to do so in 2020 where we keep having all-time record revenue weeks! We also really appreciate the team at Business Assist and I’ve always enjoyed working with a company that we feel as though they are really part of our team. We have a very healthy working relationship.

Karl Zimmerman

Since hiring Business Assist to take over our in-house Digital Marketing management, our Google Adwords spend has gone down by 75-80% and our traffic has increased by over 150%. To see such a massive drop in spend and yet an increase in traffic has to be one of the biggest and most impressive things I have ever seen.

Also, compared to what we were getting before, we see Business Assist basically as a free investment with the high returns and the increase in traffic we are getting. Not only that, each time we face any problems, the team gives us much valued solutions, not just ‘yes, we can fix that’ but also different options to choose from.

Business Assist gave us the ability to trust them with our money compared to the other 3-4 companies we had before them. We now can see where our money is going and the returns for it. They also take the time to explain details to us and make sure we are given regular updates. As we grow as a business, we see us growing with Business Assist.

Brayden Cameron

We have been using the Business Assist team since 2013. Coming from a trade background in Roofing & Roofing maintenance and jumping into Digital for all that is involved is a daunting task. We know everything worth knowing about our own trade and Digital is such an unknown area. In turn we were so hesitant because we felt like we were getting ripped off from previous attempts with other agencies and any requests for information or advice would have an extra charge or a feel like such an up-sell. Upon working with the Business Assist team we have COMPLETE clarity around the following:

  • Cost Vs Conversion (analytics)
  • Competitor analysis
  • Our target market and how to attract them
  • Brand Strategy Marketing
  • Social Media
  • SEO & so much more.

Providing these services should be a given for any Digital company – however we have found that it is not. Providing this whilst maintaining honesty and transparency even educating us along the way, whilst not making us feel like idiots because we didn’t know certain terms throughout the process is the real benefit working with Business Assist. We have meetings every week / fortnight with the team to report on every aspect of the business on a digital front. We feel the Business Assist team is an extension of our 40 + family. I think we are really fortunate we found a company that propelled us to grow from 2 staff to 40+ in 7 years – they know our company as if it was their own!