GTM provides an effortless solution for easily tracking user events and turning them into conversions, such as hotel business goals like increasing brochure downloads or increasing submissions of your hotel booking form.
Containers are groups of tags, triggers and variables configured together and applied across multiple domains.
1. Triggers
GTM provides 16 triggers, many of which are basic such as page view and click. Meanwhile, others cater to specific tracking needs. When tracking something on your website, triggers must be added for it in GTM; they listen for events and tell tags when to fire; failing which you could end up producing data that is either useless or inaccurate.
When setting up a trigger, the event type it listens for will dictate which tags it activates when fired. You can either select from a pre-defined list of event types or create your own; for instance you could create one to listen for all clicks that propagate up to link nodes; this is particularly useful when tracking click-to-call links where any clicked element (SPAN, BUTTON or DIV) counts as long as its link.
Next, it is essential that you determine whether your trigger will wait until all its dependent tags have fired before firing itself. This step can drastically decrease site loading times and improve performance; for instance, using the DOM Ready trigger for pages that load dynamic content such as images in the background ensures that none of its tags fire prematurely before all its dependent tags have completed processing.
Most triggers also offer additional settings that you can configure depending on your tag’s specific needs. For instance, Timer and Form triggers allow you to configure specific conditions that must pass before your tag will fire – such as data layer variable values or page path matches – which makes tracking even more tailored and relevant data is sent over to Google Analytics. These settings offer great ways to customize tracking while sending only relevant information into the system.
2. Variables
Google Tag Manager provides a one-stop solution for all of your tracking needs, eliminating manual tagging, reducing errors and saving both you and your developers valuable time. Furthermore, its simplicity enables tracking data such as user engagement/engagement rate conversion rates traffic sources/page views etc from websites or mobile applications.
GTM allows you to utilize Data Layer variables, which are basically helper functions that your tags and triggers can call using syntax such as variable name> to access. GTM will resolve those variable names for you so if a name changes (in approved contexts), its references will automatically update themselves.
If you need to include the Google Analytics Web Property ID of your site’s web property multiple times across tags, create a Constant variable and store its value; that way when needed just invoke its name instead of typing out code manually.
Data Layer variables provide another effective method of sending information directly into Google Analytics tags when pages load, making this an excellent solution for tracking events that cannot easily be captured by traditional Google Analytics tags, like when someone clicks an element of your hotel website. By sending that data via Data Layer variables to Meta Pixel and then Google Analytics, this data can then be analysed in depth.
There are also some handy built-in variables you can take advantage of on your website, like Element Visibility variable. It returns either True or False depending on whether a tag was activated and whether an element can be seen within browser window.
Google Analytics Settings variable provides you with a collection of Universal Analytics tag configurations, making your code simpler and increasing its security by consolidating UA-XXXXXX-X codes throughout your site.
3. Containers
Marketing and revenue managers rely on reliable data analytics when tracking website visitors, making tracking scripts easily implemented and managed without expert assistance a necessity. Google Tag Manager (GTM), however, makes managing different tracking scripts effortless by providing users with access to an easy management system for updating JavaScript and HTML tags on websites and mobile applications without the assistance of developers.
Containers are software bundles that contain everything an app needs for running, similar to virtual machines in terms of operating system level functionality. Containers enable developers to easily deploy, manage and scale applications across platforms – making them ideal for distributed systems that must run on various machines with different operating systems or configurations simultaneously.
GTM is an entryway to your hotel website which enables you to control and update the code used to track visitor behavior. Once set up correctly, GTM allows hotel marketers to monitor clicks, page views, user journeys and booking engine conversions more accurately as well as add new tools or tracking scripts without going through a developer.
To create a Google Tag Manager (GTM) container, visit the GTM dashboard and click on the Workspace icon in the top left corner. A window will open containing a textbox where you can enter a name for your container as well as select web content as the type. Finally, enter your GTM container ID which should appear as a string of characters with “GTM-XXXXXX” at its end.
Once your GTM account is configured, the Hotelchamp script needs to be implemented. Depending on your setup and requirements, either incorporate it directly into HTML of your hotel website or integrate directly into Booking Engine script – for the latter option follow this link for guidance on integrating Hotelchamp script code directly.
4. Tags
Tags are small code snippets that enable you to monitor visitor behaviour and increase conversions (like hotel bookings). Before GTM was developed, adding or amending tags required editing your website source code; but now GTM allows digital marketing teams and marketers to deploy and manage tags without needing an outside developer.
Containers, in Google Tag Manager (GTM), refers to collections of tags, triggers and variables installed on specific websites or apps. You can create one by clicking the + button next to your account name in the top-right corner of its interface and entering an appropriate name for your Workspace in the resulting window. Once created, Google Tag Manager makes working with it much simpler – providing all kinds of advanced analytics solutions tailored specifically for web content! Once your Container name has been accepted and its terms of usage accepted you’re all set to start working with Google Tag Manager on your website or app!
GTM containers each have an unique ID number which is displayed near the top of GTM workspace window (in format GTM-XXXXXX). This ID serves to uniquely identify your container within Google Tag Manager platform and knowing this number will enable you to deploy tags more efficiently.
Once your GTM container has been created, you must add our scripts for your website and booking engine. These can either be implemented directly by asking your web developer or, if using GTM Workspace directly with our template.
As part of your GTM template creation, ensure all required fields are included – this will enable tracking bookings and conversions on your website and bookable products via Google Analytics.
As GTM loads async and will compete with other resources for bandwidth and processing power on any given device that accesses your website, Guesty Websites has found that websites which place GTM templates in the head> perform worse than those who don’t.