In recent times, our approach to digital marketing has largely been data-driven. With over 3.5 billion smartphone users around the globe, we now have an unprecedented amount of data that reflects user behaviour and consumer insights.
It makes sense to say that for any successful marketing plan, data is the key. Collecting and harnessing web data has been made a lot easier by what we call “Tags”. Tags are code snippets that allow you to collect specific data regarding users on your website or mobile applications.
Today, there are hundreds of tags available each serving a different purpose. Facebook’s Pixel helps you show your ads to the right people while Google’s Analytics help you understand the behaviour of your website visitors.
Implementing different tags has been made a lot more seamless by Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager is a web-based interface that allows you to implement different third party tags on your website in a much more efficient way. In this article, I am going to show some of the most important tags for marketing that you can implement right from the Google Tag Manager.
If you are not well acquainted with GTM then you need not worry as there are tons of resources available on the internet which can help you with GTM. So, let’s get started.
1. Google Optimize
Well, I can’t stress enough the importance of A/B testing in marketing. Google Optimize helps you create multiple versions of your website and figure out what works best for you.
Whether you want to try different UI versions of your website or even different content, Google Optimize can help you do that. You can analyse the behaviour of users on multiple versions of your website and accordingly tailor the experience.
Google Optimize gives you an editor where you can create altered versions of your webpages. It integrates with your Google Analytics to provide you with user data from different versions. You might want to test different colours for your pages, different images, etc.
Google Optimize is best used for conversion rate optimization.
2. Hotjar Tracking Code
Hotjar helps you understand user behaviour on your website. Sometimes, you may not know the ‘why’ of certain numbers that Google Analytics gives you. For example, you may not know why the bounce rate is so high, why users are dropping off early. But Hotjar can give you the answers.
It gives you screen recordings, heatmaps and surveys to help you understand customer behaviour in depth.
Among all these, heatmaps are what I find most interesting and useful. Heatmap is a graphical way of representing data points by using colours. They show you which elements of your website grab the most user attention and which parts are ignored. This analysis is quite critical.
Hotjar is best used for understanding user behaviour on web pages.
3. Facebook Pixel
Facebook pixel lets you know the effectiveness of your advertising on Facebook. It helps you understand the behaviour of your website users after they saw you on Facebook ads.
Facebook Pixel works by using cookies that track your website visitors across devices. Now, how can this help you? Well, it enables you to target your Facebook ads to people who are most likely to convert because of their behaviour on your website.
Not only that, but with the help of Facebook Pixel, you can also create effective remarketing Facebook campaigns, build lookalike audiences for future ads, and track conversions from Facebook ads!
Facebook Pixel is best used for building targeted audiences for future ads, tracking conversions and remarketing campaigns.
4. MouseFlow
MouseFlow is another alternative to Hotjar, but it allows you to see exactly what users are doing when they come across a form on your website.
This information is quite useful because it can show why some users didn’t fill out the form. Maybe there was an input field they weren’t comfortable with or maybe they were having some problem while filling up the form. It could be anything and MouseFlow can reveal it for you.
In addition, MouseFlow records user mouse movements which are quite critical when it comes to developing a user-friendly website.
MouseFlow can be implemented right from Google Tag Manager.
MouseFlow is best used for tracking user behaviour on your website.
5. LinkedIn Insight
Linkedin Insight is LinkedIn’s equivalent of Pixel. It enables you to track conversions from LinkedIn ads, remarketing and developing audience profiles for Linkedin advertisements.
It gives you audience demographics so that you can make smart decisions, craft customised advertisements, and target people whose chances of converting are high.
So, if you are publishing ads on LinkedIn then this tag is a must.
LinkedIn Insight is best used for conversion tracking of LinkedIn ads.
6. Twitter Universal Website Tag
With over 152 million daily active users worldwide, Twitter has shown remarkable growth in recent times. Leaving this platform out of your ad spending budget would be a mistake.
With a universal website tag, you can track the conversion rate of users after they see your promoted tweet. Not only that, but you can also even track cross-device conversions. What this means is that whenever someone sees your ad on twitter mobile and later uses the laptop for purchase conversion data will be attributed to the same user accurately.
This gives you the power to know whether your ad budget is being spent effectively or not. Also, you can optimize your ad copy after analysing the data from Twitter Universal Website tag.
So, all these tags are pretty essential for your marketing campaigns. What’s more important is that they give you the data. What I do is mostly collect data from all these analytics tools and aggregate them and later use them to craft intelligent strategies with the help of Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence.
What you can do with this data is totally up to you!
Before you go, please note that this is about collecting user data. Please make sure you mention these in your privacy policy before using them. All the best with data-driven marketing!
