How to Install and Use Google Tag Manager

While this button doesn’t actually take you anywhere special, we have a tag on it that tracks how many times it has been clicked.

The trigger is fired when the button gets clicked which activates the tag to proceed with its instructions. In this case, to count the number of times the trigger fires.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for…..

We will use our beloved “Do Not Click!” button to explain the steps.

We need to be able to describe what our button looks like to GTM for it to know which piece of content to pay attention to. We call this description a variable.

The standard setting when first setting up a Google Tag Manager account only has page variables and the event variable selected to track.

To track the number of times our button is clicked, we need to configure the click variables.

1. Select the variables option in the Tag Manager menu (shown in the image on the left.)
2. Click “Configure” at the top left under “Built-In Variables.” This will open a window of all Tag Manager standard tracking variables
3. Scroll down until you see “Clicks”
4. Select the checkbox of all variables below “clicks” from “Click Element” to “Click Text”

To set up our trigger, we first need to verify which variable we will be utilizing in order to indicate which piece of content GTM should be paying attention to. The only way to do this is to set up a generic click trigger first.

A generic click trigger allows us to click any element on our site and see which variables were associated with that click. This will make more sense once we create the actual trigger.

1. Click “Triggers” on the left Google Tag Manager Menu.
2. Click the red “New” button.
3. Name the trigger. I usually name it “Click Trigger” to stay generic.
4. Click “Choose Trigger Type” and a menu will appear on the right hand side.
5. Under the “Choose Trigger Type” menu you will see “Click” and just under that, you will see “All Elements” select that.
6. Click save and hit preview to see the changes on your live website.

For our tag to accurately fire we must know which variables are associated with the action you wish to track.  Now that we have our generic trigger set up we can see these details on our live website.

Make sure to refresh the page before moving any further. This will update the changes we just added on GTM.

Go to the element you will be tracking, hold command or ctrl on your keyboard and click the desired object.

Now that we know what variables we are going to use to fire our trigger we can head back over to google tag manager and navigate back to the “Triggers” tab on the left GTM menu.

Click “New Trigger” and follow the following steps:

1. Name your trigger: (We named ours “DO NOT CLICK T”
2. Click “Choose Trigger Type” and under Clicks select “All Elements”
3. Under “This trigger firs on” select “Some Clicks” instead of the automatically selected “All Clicks.” This will reveal our conditions menu.
4. The first condition is set to our page URL. We only want our trigger to fire on this page.
5. Click the plus sign on the right of the first condition to reveal the second condition.
6. Select “Click Text” or, if you are using a different variable type, select the variable category you are using.
7. Once you’ve added the second condition, click save.

The final product should look like the image below:

Now that we have our triggers and conditions set up to fire when our button is pressed, we need to associate it with a tag. The tag will be the information that gets sent to Google Analytics when the trigger is fired.

1. Navigate to the “Tags” section on the left GTM menu.
2. Select “New.”
3. Name your tag. (We named ours DO NOT CLICK)
4. Click “Tag Configuration” and select “Google Analytics.”
5. There will be a dropdown menu currently showing “Page View.” Click the drop-down and select “Event.”
6. This is going to give you 3 different empty field boxes. (Category, Label, and Value). This is how the information is going to be labeled in your Google Analytics so it’s important to name them in a way that will keep you organized. You can see our example below.
7. The last item is your “Google Analytics Setting.” You can select “New Variable” and add your Analytics Tracking Code into the empty field.
8. Click “Triggering”  below and select the trigger we created earlier.
9. Click “Save” at the top right and you’re all set.

On the left side menu in Google Analytics you will see the “Behavior” option. When you click that it will dropdown a secondary menu. One of those options is “Events.” Click on events, then “Overview”

This will show you an overview of all the tag categories that have been triggered within your selected time period. You can see the hierarchy of “Event Category”, “Event Action”, and “Event Label” that we organized when setting up the tag.

We are tracking the button interactions on our blog so our Category is “blog”, our Action is “button clicks”, and our Label is “DO NOT CLICK.”