Sitewide tags are the building blocks of a strong measurement foundation. They help advertisers understand how customers are interacting with their website and ads. But, it’s historically been difficult to set up and manage tags without technical expertise or a tag management platform like Google Tag Manager. To address this, we recently rolled out a single, reusable Google tag so you can do more across different Google products and accounts without changing your website code. Now we’re unveiling another set of capabilities that provide more visibility into your site’s measurement coverage and simplify the setup.

Whether it’s through the Google tag or Google Tag Manager, proper sitewide tagging is essential to successfully measure and act on your data. One company that has shown measurement excellence through tagging is The North Face, a retail brand that’s advancing exploration through innovative thinking, design, and technology. Using our enterprise tag management solution, Google Tag Manager 360, the brand has been able to unlock customer insights that influence everything from future campaigns to product offerings and website design. “Tagging is the backbone of our consumer experience. Rather than forecasting by putting a finger to the wind, we can make data-driven decisions using real-time and historical data.” shares Sarah Kleinman, VP of Digital Experiences.

Increase your measurement accuracy

As your digital presence grows, it can be easy to miss pages or overlook new site sections. With the new Tag coverage summary, you can quickly determine whether your Google tag has been implemented on all of your website pages.

You’ll see where your tags are implemented in suggested pages, which can be added to your summary to understand your tag coverage on these pages later. And, if the suggestions don’t include all of your website pages, quickly add the URLs by entering them or uploading a CSV file. You can also click the Tag Assistant icon next to each page to investigate whether your tags are implemented properly.

Simplify setup with less code

In the coming weeks, we'll be integrating the Google tag into the account setup and conversion setup flows in Google Ads and Google Analytics — product interfaces you’re already familiar with — for a more centralized and intuitive experience. These new features will make it faster and easier to set up conversion measurement. You won’t need to add more code to your website, which often relies on technical expertise or assistance from other departments.

For customers using popular content management systems or website builders, you’ll now be able to install a new Google tag across your website without making manual changes to the site code. You can also now reuse your existing gtag.js implementation or create a new Google tag to deploy without making changes to your website code. You can do this directly in your CMS within the Ads and Analytics account setup flows. CMS instructions are shown on your installation screen for the following platforms that are integrated with the Google tag.

If you’re still using Universal Analytics, we recently shared that now it’s time to make the move to Google Analytics 4. If you have gtag.js for Google Ads or Universal Analytics on your website, you will be able to do this directly in the setup assistant in Google Analytics by choosing an existing Google tag. If you don't have a Google tag on your site or are using an analytics.js tag, you’ll need to create a new tag before you can get started, which you can do within the same, simplified workflow.

With so much at stake when it comes to performance and privacy, it’s more important than ever to ensure you have a strong measurement foundation. We’re with you every step of the way and these new features make it easier to set up and manage your tagging infrastructure within the product interfaces you’re already familiar with.

Measurement is the bedrock of digital advertising. Accurate measurement relies on robust tagging to help you reach people who have visited your website or app. It also serves as the foundation of a privacy-centric measurement strategy revolving around information people agree to share with you, so-called consented, first party and modeled data. It’s critical that advertisers have durable, sitewide tagging in place as legacy identifiers such as third-party cookies are phased out. Tagging will help you strengthen user privacy, keep up with rapidly changing regulations and continue measuring performance and modeling insights.

Evolving with your measurement needs

To help you keep pace with industry changes, we've centralized our tagging solutions with Google Tag Manager, an enterprise tag management system, and the global site tag (gtag.js), which lets advertisers send event data to Google Analytics, Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform. But we’ve heard from you that tagging is still cumbersome.

Today, we’re further improving the tagging experience with the new Google tag — a single, reusable tag built on top of your existing gtag.js implementations that helps you confidently measure impact and preserve user trust. Starting today and rolling out over the next week, the Google tag will unlock new capabilities to help you do more, improve data quality and adopt new features — without requiring more code. As we’ve previously recommended with the global site tag, the Google tag should be installed on all pages of your website.

For customers using Google Tag Manager, you will not experience any changes to your setup today. But, stay tuned for future updates on tighter integration and upgrade paths between the Google tag and Google Tag Manager.

Centralized sitewide tagging

Advertisers with multiple instances of gtag.js can now combine those tags and centrally manage their settings in the Google tag screens in Google Ads and Google Analytics. Since it’ll be easier to set up sitewide tagging and combine or reuse tags, you can easily increase the number of tagged pages with consistent configuration. This helps improve measurement, leading to better-quality customer insights. You can also now manage user access to your tag settings across products in one dedicated place, giving you more control over who has access to critical measurement settings. Rest assured, your existing gtag.js implementations will continue to work and will automatically become the Google tag.

Faster and easier setup

In the coming months, you’ll also be able to use your existing Google tag installation when setting up another Google product or account or creating new conversion actions, instead of configuring additional code each time. We’ve simplified complex workflows for a simple and quick setup experience that works across Google Ads and Google Analytics, within the product interfaces that you’re already familiar with.

And, for customers using popular content management systems like HubSpot, Squarespace or Wix, you’ll be able to install a new Google tag without any code at all.

Preparing today for the future

The Google tag is a new centralized approach to tagging, integrated with many of our other privacy solutions to give advertisers more control and ease of use. As with your existing gtag.js and Google Tag Manager implementations, the Google tag continues to work well with solutions such as Consent Mode and Server-Side Tagging.

The Google tag is the first of many improvements to come and we’ll have more to share in coming months so you can better prepare today for the future.