Google announced Monday night on a number of different blogs/emails etc. that they have released a product called Google Tag Manager. It’s free to use, and you can use it to manage all your tags such as Google Analytics, Google AdWords Conversion Tracking, Google AdWords Remarketing and various other tags.

It looks to me as though this could be a key step to helping everyone sort out their websites for the EU cookie directive – at least I hope so. On top of that is has some interesting features – one of which is the ability to pull data out of your webpage.

I’m only beginning to get my head around it, but I’m pretty sure that this will open up a world of possibilities, for marketers without coding knowledge in particular.

Speed Improvements

Anything you put into Google Tag Manager will load asynchronously, which means it should reduce page load times. On top of that it also uses caching to prevent too many requests, again this will improve load times.

Code

The code is fairly simple, it’s just like adding the Google Analytics script to a web page, the code looks a bit like this:

<!– Google Tag Manager –>
<noscript><iframe src=”//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-3ZSP”
height=”0″ width=”0″ style=”display:none;visibility:hidden”></iframe></noscript>
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({‘gtm.start’:
new Date().getTime(),event:’gtm.js’});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!=’dataLayer’?'&l=’+l:”;j.async=true;j.src=
‘//www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=’+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,’script’,'dataLayer’,'GTM-3ZSP’);</script>
<!– End Google Tag Manager –>

I’ll probably get this setup on my own site and learn the ins and outs before I put it on any client sites, my main concern is that it doesn’t have all the same options as a more complex Google Analytics script when you choose that tag. So it may need a bit of work before it becomes usable by many ecommerce sites.