Google Tag Manager vs. Google Analytics – Clarifying the Concepts

The short answer is that Google Analytics (GA) is a web analytics tool that collects and presents data about your users in various types of reports. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tag management tool that can easily and securely manage the code needed to collect data for Google Analytics and other tools, such as Meta Insights and LinkedIn Insights. We recommend using them together to maximise the effectiveness of your web analytics and digital marketing tracking. In this article, we will provide a more detailed description. We'll start by explaining what Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are used for.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 is by far the most common web analytics tool among our clients. It's a free tool developed by Google. In Google Analytics, you can see reports showing, for example, the number of users, which pages they visit, how long they stay on different pages, and which forms they submit. This can be linked to the marketing campaign the user came from, helping companies to better invest their marketing budget. The data in Google Analytics can also be used to analyse how we can improve the site itself and get more people to buy (or other conversions), which is called conversion optimisation. For us as an agency, this means that we can show that we are delivering on the KPIs and goals we set at the beginning of a project.

How does Google Analytics work?

For the analytics tool to collect user data, the Google Analytics tracking code needs to be placed on all pages of the site. By installing the tracking code, certain data about users and page views is collected, and Google Analytics 4 has features to automatically collect data about file downloads, outbound clicks, etc. But there are still parts of the tracking that you need to configure yourself. This includes, for instance, what constitutes conversions on your website, such as a user submitting a form and a thank-you page being displayed, or clicking on a specific button. This is called key events. Configuring key events is important for all reports in Google Analytics to be filled with data.

The tracking can be set up directly in the page's source code, which would require a developer, and all settings or additions to the tracking scripts would also need to be made directly in the page's source code. This becomes a limitation for marketers and analysts, as well as a lot of work for developers. The alternative to placing the analytics tool's tracking code directly in the source code is Google Tag Manager (or another tag management tool).

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a tag management tool, a tool for organising, managing, and updating tags on a website. When we talk about digital marketing, tracking and data collection, a tag is a piece of code designed to collect and send information to another system, such as the tracking code for Google Analytics (or Meta Pixel, which sends information to Meta). Google Tag Manager allows you to add, change, or remove tags without involving developers and changing the underlying code.

Google Tag Manager acts as a container for all tags on a website. A developer needs to implement Google Tag Manager on the website. When a visitor then visits the website, the Google Tag Manager container is loaded, and the tags that are set to trigger on the current page are activated. Google Tag Manager can also be used to set rules for when tags should trigger, for example, based on the visitor's behavior or which page they visit. Google Tag Manager provides a clear overview of the marketing tags used on a website. For companies with active digital marketing, this can involve a large number of tags.

In addition to being easier to use, Google Tag Manager also reduces the risk of errors on the site by eliminating the need to modify the source code.

A Summary

To summarise the answer to our initial question about Google Tag Manager vs. Google Analytics, the answer is that one does not exclude the other. The tools are used for different things. Google Tag Manager is the tool for implementing and managing the tags that collect data, while Google Analytics is the tool we use to display and analyse the data. They work best together: our recommendation and best practice is to always use Google Tag Manager to implement Google Analytics tracking.