Tip: Google Tag Manager and Retargeting Ads

[mki]

Problem: You don't want people who instantly bounced to be in your retargeting audience.

The solution to this is to use Google Tag Manager.

You can setup GTM so your pixels fire after say 15-30 seconds (it depends on the situation what amount of time is better.)

Here's a good guide:

https://ventin.co/delay-pixel-landing-page-eliminate-bounce-traffic-using-google-tag-manger/

Tip: Tag Assistant does not tell you that the Facebook tag fired, you'll have to press f12 and verify that it fired in the network tab.

If you see fbevents.js in the log, it works.

I spent about an hour trying to figure out why the tag wasn't firing and it was working perfectly.

Tip 2: If you've never used GTM before, be prepared for a super fun time. I setup GTM for my new site today and it took 4 hours to setup, granted, I do some more advanced things like tracking clicks to external sites in Google Analytics. Thankfully there's a plugin for Wordpress called "Google Tag Manager for Wordpress" that worked with my theme. Usually, it doesn't and I have to edit the theme files. So depending on what you want to do with it, you can just use it for the retargeting pixels, or you can implement a bunch of Google Analytics tweaks. There's a bunch of good content about that over at https://www.lunametrics.com/

My personal implementation was a little bit tricky because I have sections of my site where I want the pixel to drop quickly and others where I want it to fire after 30 seconds. I also want the pixels to drop instantly on the thank you page, so I can exclude them in the audience. I also have 2 copies of wordpress installed. One is for the public site that I want showing up in Google, the other is installed in a directory and forbids all search engines.

[100DegreesC]

There are so many cool things you can do with Google Tag Manager.

I use it on all my sites, but never had it take 4 hours to setup. Usually have it setup in less than 30 minutes, but it sounds like you are tracking a lot more than I have ever needed to.

[Mike Friedman]

I have been surprised at how many of my customers were not using Google Tag Manager when I started working with them.

I'm kind of wondering among the IM community and other SEOs now. Do most people not use it? I sort of just assumed that people did.

 

 

[Wunderkind]

4 hours ago, Mike Friedman said:

I have been surprised at how many of my customers were not using Google Tag Manager when I started working with them.

I'm kind of wondering among the IM community and other SEOs now. Do most people not use it? I sort of just assumed that people did.

Are that many people really not using Tag Manager? What the heck are web designers doing?

[mki]

On 6/28/2018 at 8:33 AM, Mike Friedman said:

I have been surprised at how many of my customers were not using Google Tag Manager when I started working with them.

I'm kind of wondering among the IM community and other SEOs now. Do most people not use it? I sort of just assumed that people did.

/shrug

How many sites do you want me to scan?

Edit: Scanned 3,000 sites. SEMRush -> Neilpatel.com -> Organic Competitors -> Exported First 3000

ScrapeBox Link Checker looked for the footprint / "URL" (It can be anything excluding an HTML tag.)

Google Tag Manager

Results:

Found 1925.

So about 65% of sites that are "marketing aware."

 

[Mike Friedman]

58 minutes ago, mki said:

/shrug

How many sites do you want me to scan?

Edit: Scanned 3,000 sites. SEMRush -> Neilpatel.com -> Organic Competitors -> Exported First 3000

ScrapeBox Link Checker looked for the footprint / "URL" (It can be anything excluding an HTML tag.)

Google Tag Manager

Results:

Found 1925.

So about 65% of sites that are "marketing aware."

 

Lol. Okay, I wasn't quite that curious.

More than I thought though.

[mki]

4 hours ago, Mike Friedman said:

More than I thought though.

Well those are organic competitors of the biggest online marketing site online. If I picked organic competitors of a dog training website, I would expect the number to be much lower.

[BigDave]

On 6/28/2018 at 8:33 AM, Mike Friedman said:

I have been surprised at how many of my customers were not using Google Tag Manager when I started working with them.

I'm kind of wondering among the IM community and other SEOs now. Do most people not use it? I sort of just assumed that people did.

 

 

 

On 6/28/2018 at 1:13 PM, Wunderkind said:

Are that many people really not using Tag Manager? What the heck are web designers doing?

 

I have to confess. I just recently started using Google Tag Manager in May after reading this thread. I didn't even know it existed.

[JohnHemmer]

By the way, for any of you GTM virgins, Mike pointed out a great YouTube channel to me with some awesome GTM tutorials, along with a ton of other great content about analytics and tracking stats.

It's called MeasureSchool.