Tag Archives: Tag Manager

Engagement Jumps 30% for Wyndham Vacation Rentals With Help from Google Analytics Premium

Wyndham Vacation Rentals runs 9,000 North American rental properties from the mountains of Utah to the beaches of South Carolina.  As you can imagine, that many guests and destinations creates some interesting challenges for Wyndham's online booking system.  

They turned to Google Analytics Premium and Google Tag Manager for help, and we've just published a new case study showing the results. (Spoiler alert: property search CTRs are up by 30%.)

Wyndham did some very clever things with both tools. For instance, they used Google Tag Manager to implement Google Analytics Premium Custom Dimensions to capture user behavior around metrics like rental dates and length of stay. Then they used Google Analytics Premium to dig into the details and gather insights. That's how they learned that, while a "good view" is one of the top things customers included in searches, the scenic view attribute actually had a lower conversion rate than other features offered in their suites.  

As a result, Wyndham redesigned its search results to put the properties with the most profitable mix of attributes on the first page. The Wyndham team also learned how far in advance people begin searching for various vacations, and have adjusted their campaigns and spending to match the peaks in demand.

With changes like these, Wyndham's customers are maintaining more interest through all stages of the funnel. Wyndham says its property search CTR has skyrocketed by more than 30%. Here's what Nadir Ali, their Director of eCommerce Analytics, has to say about this success:
“Google Analytics Premium is helping us connect the dots. As a data-driven organization, we strive to approach each business challenge objectively and back our assumptions with data. Google Analytics Premium gives us the flexibility to customize the data we collect in a manner that makes it easy to answer our business questions.” 
We're always happy to see the creative ways partners use Google Analytics Premium and tools like Google Tag Manager. Congrats to Wyndham on some excellent (and ongoing) results.

See the Wyndham Vacation Rentals case study

Posted by Rachel Reader, Google Analytics Marketing

Learn to optimize your tag implementation with Google Tag Manager Fundamentals

We're excited to announce that our next Analytics Academy course, Google Tag Manager Fundamentals, is now open for participation. Whether you’re a marketer, analyst, or developer, this course will teach you how Google Tag Manager can simplify the tag implementation and management process.

You'll join instructor Krista Seiden to explore topics through the lens of a fictional online retailer, The Great Outdoors and their Travel Adventures website. Using practical examples, she’ll show you how to use tools like Google Analytics and Google AdWords tags to improve your data collection process and advertising strategies.


By participating in the course, you’ll explore:
  • the core concepts and principles of tag management using Google Tag Manager
  • how to create website tags and manage firing triggers
  • how to enhance your Google Analytics implementation
  • the importance of using the Data Layer to collect valuable data for analysis
  • how to configure other marketing tags, like AdWords Conversion Tracking and Dynamic Remarketing
We're looking forward to your participation in this course!

Sign up for Google Tag Manager Fundamentals and start learning today.

Happy tagging!

Post By: Lizzie Pace & The Google Analytics Education Team

Solutions Guide for Implementing Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager

Marketers, developers, and practitioners of analytics depend on having the right data at the right time - but implementing analytics code or AdWords pixels can be a less than fun (or easy) experience. Google Tag Manager makes tagging simple and fast by letting you add tags with a simple UI instead of code, while also offering advanced tracking features used by some of the web’s top sites.

Today we’re excited to announce the launch of the Solutions Guide section on the Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager Help Centers. The Solutions Guide area is focused on providing actionable, hands on, step-by-step instructions for implementing Google Analytics, AdWords, DoubleClick, and other third party tags via Google Tag Manager. 

In this guide, you’ll learn:
  • When and why to use Google Tag Manager
  • Best practices for naming conventions and setup tips
  • When to choose the Data Layer or the Tag Manager UI
  • How to implement GA event tracking, custom dimensions & cross-domain tracking
  • How to setup AdWords, Doubleclick, and Dynamic Remarketing tags in GTM
We’re thrilled to share this with you and hope you find it helpful as you implement Google Tag Manager.

Check out the new GTM Solutions Guide today!

Happy Tagging.

Posted by Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate

Making tag management more accessible and powerful

Today we are happy to introduce improvements to Google Tag Manager that will make both marketing and IT teams happy: 
  • New APIs that tailor the power of Google Tag Manager to your unique needs
  • A new intuitive interface to help you launch and edit tags even faster
  • More 3rd-party templates to make tagging easier
Many large enterprises use Google Tag Manager to streamline and simplify website and mobile app tagging. It helps marketers control the end-to-end process of adding website tags, while IT departments save time they can spend on more strategic projects. InsureandGo has been using Google Tag Manager for all their tagging needs:

“Before, we missed opportunities because tag changes required a website release. Since we’ve enabled Google Tag Manager on the site, it’s enabled the marketing team to measure more on-site actions. For example, using Google Tag Manager to track on-page events such as specific clicks and form submissions helps us understand more granular customer actions, how to market and what to sell. We can make decisions much quicker and see within a few weeks whether the strategy has worked, whereas before it would have taken six to nine months.” Simon Everett, Head of Marketing

Let's look at the new features.


Introducing Google Tag Manager API

Sometimes you just want things your own way. We understand! The new full-featured Google Tag Manager API lets you customize the infrastructure to suit your needs, whether that means building your own tools or better integrations with your existing workflow. From creating and managing users to previewing and publishing containers and tags, the API provides all the power of the web interface.

For example, the new API makes it easy to manage user access in bulk. It's easy to set permissions for many users at once, or set up your own role-based permissions and let the API give the right level of access to the right people in your organization.

Agencies can use the API to easily manage large tagging setups for their clients: create a master container template, specify variations (such as the domain, or the ad campaign ID) in a Google Sheets doc, and use the API to automatically deploy to multiple containers and keep those containers in sync. 

Our partner Novartis has been able to scale more easily by using Google Tag Manager APIs:

We have a strong data-driven culture at Novartis and thus in the digital space we’re naturally interested in using data and insights to improve the usability and experience of our websites. With many brands and websites across the globe, collecting web analytics data can become time consuming. Two challenges we have faced are data consistency and tagging implementation across many sites. We developed a process where we use the Google Tag Manager API to eliminate a manual, error-prone, process and thus were able to shift our attention from several low-value tasks to determining how to create a great digital experience for our customers.
Angela Grammatas - Digital Analytics Manager for Novartis


More coverage for 3rd-party tags

Starting in the next few weeks, you'll see more 3rd-party templates in the tag creation flow. We've made it easier for marketers to add tags and minimize errors while doing so. When adding a new tag of your own, you'll select from a list of 3rd-party providers and be underway in just a few clicks. We now offer support for tags from AdRoll, Marin, Comscore, Bizo, Clicktale, Neustar, Distillery, Turn, Mediaplex, VisualDNA, quantcast, Criteo and many more to come soon. Don't see the tag you need? No problem: you can add it immediately as a custom HTML tag. You can also ask to have a new tag template included in future releases, as Tag Manager will continue to add new tag templates. You'll find the full list of tag templates in our help center.

Creating a new tag (click image for full-size).


A more intuitive interface

We think tag management should be easy even for non-technical users. Even if you're new to Google Tag Manager, you'll be using the improved interface within minutes. Tasks are intuitive and structured much the same way as in AdWords and Google Analytics. Our new updates include:
  • A default workflow that's simpler and clearer
  • Instant search and autocomplete that can help you find anything in your Google Tag Manager containers
  • New keyboard shortcuts to simplify life for power users
The goal: enable marketing managers to easily add and update tags.

The new container overview page (click image for full-size).

We are confident you'll find the new Google Tag Manager easier to use and a more powerful solution for your web and app tagging needs. If you are already using Google Tag Manager, you can try out the new user interface today by logging in your accounts and following the instructions. New to Google Tag Manager? Get started today!

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Product Manager Google Tag Manager