Digital marketing is always on, and doesn’t wait for you to adapt to how quickly it can change. To capitalize on the conversations your customers and prospects are having right now, you need to get insights in real-time, then implement data-driven marketing strategies based on those insights. You need to be able to implement your measurement strategy in minutes and begin collecting data immediately—without waiting for another department’s help or getting stuck in an IT queue. 

A recent Forbes Insights study found that 87% of companies are “laggards” when it comes to leveraging customer data for data-driven marketing. This is what we see as well. But it’s not surprising—there are a lot of barriers to real-time insight gathering: you might not currently be tracking valuable actions at all or there may be a technology or staffing barrier, or you may not be empowered to implement tracking or analyze your data.

Not tracking and leveraging customer data can impact your bottom line, with those that don’t use data to make decisions ultimately facing a real cost for lagging behind. The same study found that data “leaders” were more likely to have significantly higher returns than data “laggards.” 

With just a little piece of code on your website, Google Tag Manager can eliminate the barriers to tracking and evaluating user data and make real-time insights based on that data a reality. Tag Manager can help you track the valuable actions that Google Analytics doesn’t track by default, like: 

• Clicks on a specific call to action on a page
• Clicks on a link to an external site
• Video plays, as well as video completes and percentage watched
• How far visitors are scrolling on a page

Tag Manager also integrates with other popular marketing platforms through both built-in and custom events, which allow you to easily connect the dots in your customer journey and quickly assess which channels and campaigns are producing the best Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). 

Once the Tag Manager container is installed on your website, you will no longer need support from IT or a developer to begin collecting additional site data. Creating an event takes less than a few minutes, and each time you launch a new website feature, campaign or new piece of content, you can easily add tracking to it to determine how it’s performing. 

And once you’ve implemented events in Tag Manager, that data can be used to answer very general questions like: 

• Does a specific marketing channel have value? 
• Are users are watching a video on your site? 
• Are returning users more likely to convert?

Or, very specific questions like:

• Which ad creative from your campaign leads to more conversions? 
• Are users who watch a video to the end more likely to convert than users who only watch half?
• How many touchpoints does it take a returning user to convert?

Better still, data from events set up in Tag Manager can be used to inform your data-driven marketing efforts before they start by creating:

• Custom audiences that can be used in Google Ads
• A burn/exclusion list of existing customers based on their on-site behavior
• A remarketing campaign based on specific site actions 

By leveraging your own data before you begin a new marketing effort, you’ll leave the laggards behind. Understanding how your customers and prospects behave—not just what they view—allows you to spend smarter, incur less waste, and gets you closer to meeting your objectives.  

Ready to get started and use your data to make better marketing decisions? Download the KW2 Guide to Google Tag Manager and start getting real-time insights today.