By: Craig Smith
To prepare their websites for the holiday rush, most companies put a “freeze” on their website code sometime in the fall. The freeze ensures that, from that point on, no new features will appear on the site, and the only changes made will be bug fixes. This gives them plenty of time to fix bugs before the surge of shoppers pushes servers to the limit. One way you can make your IT staff’s lives easier during your busiest season is by implementing Google’s Tag Manager.
The Benefits of Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is an update to the company’s popular analytics platform that hopes to solve some of the common headaches detailed tracking can cause. In the past, adding new triggers to your analytics meant updating the code on every page. For large sites, this is time-consuming and potentially costly.
GTM supports a wide range of third-party and custom tags out of the box, meaning marketers can integrate analytics, advertising, and conversion tracking tools faster without waiting on hard-coded updates.
How GTM works
Once you add the code, known as a Container, to your website, you can add and remove analytic parameters without backend access. Instead, the container automatically loads your GTM profile from Google itself, which means it’s always up to date.
Google Tag Manager reduces the amount of JavaScript firing on your site, streamlines testing, and allows your marketing team to make changes to their tracking analytics without opening a trouble ticket. While the initial migration might be stressful, moving to Google Tag Manager will save your IT team headaches in the future.
Recent updates allow for more granular workspace and version controls, so multiple team members can collaborate on tags, triggers, and variables without risking errors in live environments.
The platform’s built-in debugging tools, Preview Mode improvements, and automated error checks make testing far more reliable than in the past. With server-side tagging, GTM can now reduce client-side JavaScript load and improve site performance—critical for Core Web Vitals and SEO.
Whether you’re experienced with web development or just want to know how your site is performing, keep reading to learn the benefits of a Google Tag Manager
GTM Reduces IT Trouble Tickets
Most eCommerce companies have a long honey-do list for the IT department. From feed upgrades to algorithm builds, they often have a list of requests they’re working on at any given time. While updating analytics code isn’t a difficult technical problem, it takes valuable time away from other projects.
This is why it’s not unusual for IT teams to give code update requests a low priority, getting to them only when they have the time. For marketing departments, this can be incredibly frustrating because, to them, the update shouldn’t take four to six weeks. In fast-moving digital campaigns, even a two-week delay can mean missing seasonal opportunities or falling behind competitors—making self-service analytics updates even more critical.
GTM lets marketers make changes to their tags without affecting the other code on the site. Since all updates are made on code within the GTM container, the marketers are often able to make updates in a few minutes, not weeks. Having technical supervision is still ideal, but it’s not required. Since the code isn’t hosted on the site, if it does negatively impact performance, marketers can remove it with just a few clicks.
Recent GTM updates have expanded this flexibility with Preview Mode improvements and a seamless Tag Assistant integration, so marketers can test, validate, and debug changes before they go live.
With features like workspaces and version control, multiple team members can safely collaborate without overwriting each other’s work. Advanced options such as server-side tagging also reduce the strain on IT by shifting processing away from the browser, improving page performance and Core Web Vitals scores.
Run Low-Cost A/B Tests
Almost any marketer will highlight the importance of A/B Testing as a way to determine different site layouts, headline styles, and cart options. Unfortunately, few actually have the time and budget to continually brainstorm new ways to do things.
By adding A/B testing code to GTM, you can update and modify experiments on the fly without additional and costly software. Marketers can now use GTM to deploy scripts from tools like Convert or Optimizely or custom JavaScript snippets to run split tests. With GTM’s Preview Mode and workspace versioning, experiments can be quickly launched, monitored, and rolled back without involving IT. For advanced teams, GTM’s server-side tagging helps ensure tests don’t slow page load times, preserving user experience while gathering valuable data.
Easily Set Up Auto Event Tracking
With traditional analytics coding, marketing and IT departments had to manually create rules for tracking events like form submissions and video plays. With GTM, marketers now rely on built-in auto-event triggers that detect user interactions without additional code changes.
GTM includes native triggers for clicks, form submissions, scroll depth, file downloads, and YouTube video interactions. These triggers automatically capture activity and send it to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or other platforms, making it easier to measure the effectiveness of calls-to-action, content, and user flows.
For marketers unfamiliar with event tracking, the interface can still feel overwhelming at first, but GTM’s Preview Mode and Tag Assistant make it far easier to test and validate events compared to manual coding.
Email sign-ups, contact forms, scroll depth, and video engagement can all point to valuable user intent and help highlight friction points on your site. GA4 has also emphasized the importance of “engagement events,” making GTM’s auto-event tracking essential for understanding the full customer journey beyond the final conversion.
Tag Managers and the Future of Analytics
Analytics reporting has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past 20 years, along with most other forms of technology. Google Analytics tracks users across multiple devices so eCommerce sites can better understand the customer process, while Google is constantly evaluating the site to store metrics and offline data. The future of data is predictive and then proactive analytics, and GTM is working to get us there.
Historically, analytics tools collected everything and the kitchen sink. It didn’t matter whether or not the information was relevant; the data was collected and reported, leaving it to your team to make any useful insights. Now, Google and its competitors filter out unnecessary information and only present data that’s relevant to users. From a tag management perspective, this means firing certain tags and collecting information when users exhibit certain behavior coming to the site or taking specific steps when they’re on the page or leaving it.
With the introduction of Consent Mode v2, GA4 and GTM now respect user consent signals while still modeling behavior to fill reporting gaps. This ensures marketers capture actionable insights while remaining compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and other regulations.
The next great frontier in analytics is predictive analysis, where tools will study behaviors and analyze what should happen next based on trends. Eventually, this will lead to suggestions for businesses or changes made automatically by the algorithm.
GA4 already incorporates predictive metrics—such as purchase probability and churn probability—giving businesses forward-looking insights. GTM complements this by enabling custom data collection that can feed predictive models, from AI-driven personalization engines to customer lifetime value analysis.
Just as tag managers eliminated the need for marketers to hard-code every update, predictive and AI-powered analytics will reduce the manual effort required to analyze trends. With server-side tagging, businesses are also preparing for a cookieless future, improving data accuracy while reducing dependence on third-party scripts.
Together, GTM and GA4 are shifting analytics from reactive reporting to proactive decision-making, freeing eCommerce teams to focus on improving the customer experience rather than deciphering data.
