Asklemmy

43788 readers

829 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What Do google Tag Service and google Analytics Do? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My understanding of google analytics is that it is a 'free' tool which gives site operators bird's eye information on site traffic like the old fashion visitor counters all the way down to very granular information like what buttons users click on.

I have no idea what google tag service does. Based on a prior conversations I've had, I believe it has something to do with SEO.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, use the developer tools in Firefox to view the HTML of the page you are on. In the header you'll see javascript blocks. You'll see google analytics and tag service on just about every site, often meta or amazon, and some with completely unidentifiable names. I imagine the latter are the non big tech third parties we accept with cookies, but I'm not sure about that either.

top 4 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Google Tag Manager (often abbreviated as GTM) allows site operators to dynamically inject scripts or update tracking code without requiring a new deployment. It's often used alongside Google Analytics for the latter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I also found this non-nonsense explanation https://www.analyticsmania.com/post/google-tag-manager-vs-google-analytics/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Others have defined what GTM does pretty well without a basic definition of it's most common purpose. Google Analytics (GA4) has a number of conversions it can track automatically on your website, like if someone spends more than 5 minutes on your site after finding it in search results. GTM allows for customization of certain conversion triggers so you can track more specific actions and those that don't have automatic tracking parameters in GA4. Using GTM just allows for more robust and customizable tracking basically, at least in its most common usage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Google analytics is loaded by JavaScript. There are also other things like Google analytics that are also loaded by JavaScript.

Updating a website can take time, and usually involves someone with at least a passing knowledge of development.

Google tag manager is a service that lets you embed one JavaScript thing in your page, and then it will handle loading the others. This lets marketing or analytics people add and manage such things without needing to make a full code deployment.
It also lets you make choices about when and how different tracking events for different services are triggered.

It's intended usage is garbage tracking metrics and advertising. Some sites are built more by marketing than developers, and they'll jam functional stuff in there which causes breakage if you block it. These sites are usually garbage though, so nothing of value was lost.