Now Auto Track On-Page Events With Google Tag Manager

The Google Tag Manager is a marketing tool that lets business owners keep track and take control of their remarketing and other data-driven campaigns by letting them assign tags to campaigns and events in Google Analytics. Hence, Google Tag Manager makes it easy to track events. Ordinarily, tracking events requires adding custom Javascript and HTML code to your individual webpages to tell Google Analytics when the event occurred. But thanks to Google, this is no more the case. As announced on the Google Analytics blog, Google Tag Manager now hosts a latest feature - auto event tracking which lets you measure events happening on the page without writing HTML or Javascript!

Google Tag Manager

The Google Tag Manager makes it easy for marketers to focus on the marketing itself, rather than on the underlying marketing technology. It lets you add or update your website tags and mobile applications, easily and for free, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks.

Sites these days are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex, and understanding users' interactions with the website has become very important for business owners. These include analytics insights, such as how long a user stays on a website, how many are clicking through to the Contact page, etc. Understanding and tracking these events required Google Tag Manager users to add custom HTML and JS codes to their webpages to tell Google Analytics when an event has occurred. This creates a hassle, and results in a wastage of time, and resources if the user isn't familiar with coding.

That's where the auto event tracking feature comes in.

Auto Event Tracking

The Auto Event Tracking feature is a solution that provides the power of event tracking without needing to write code. By using the new Event Listener tag, you can tell Tag Manager when you want to listen for events, and then write detailed rules for what to do when an event happens!

Here's an example from GA's blog about 'listening' for form submissions.

Once you have set up an event listener, you can have certain tags fired based on form submissions, by using a rule that looks for the event gtm.formSubmit (for the example above). You can also make sure you’re getting the right form by using the Auto-Event Variable macros that let you narrow things down with attributes like the element ID and the form target.

Now the example illustrates how to listen for a form submissions, but that's only one type of event. Google Tag Manager also lets you listen for Clicks, Timer Events, and more!

The end result: you can deploy event tracking to your site and send event tracking data to Google Analytics without adding any code to your site. You can deploy measurement campaigns faster, and not writing custom code makes your solutions more robust!

Have you used this new feature? Got any feedback? Or perhaps a questions? Feel free to fire away in our comments section below! Cheers :)

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Unknown 10/26/2013 Google Analytics