It feels like you have to work harder than ever to get campaign results for your clients. That’s why marketing agencies need both Event Tracking and a Tag Manager in 2022.
Using both of these tools will help you get real results for clients in less time.
Event Tracking allows you to test user journeys, understand audiences and convert more visitors into paying customers.
The second part is a Tag Manager. By using this, marketing agencies can set up and manage Event Tracking without having to rely on developers to change code every time a new tag is required, have more ownership and control of client data and optimise campaigns faster.
By the end of this article, you’ll know:
- The difference between Event Tracking and Tag Manager
- Why you need both Event Tracking and a Tag Manager to run campaigns for your clients
- The best ways to use Event Tracking and a Tag Manager in 2022
What’s the difference between Event Tracking and Tag Manager?
To start, tags (sometimes referred to as pixels) are pieces of code that are added to the source code of your website. When a tag is executed (e.g. a visitor visits the page with the tag embedded on it), it sends information to your analytics tool or third-party tool for reporting.
Examples of tags include:
- Analytics
- Conversion Tracking
- Newsletter signups
- Exit popups and surveys
- Remarketing
- Social widgets
- Affiliates
- Ads and more
Tags can be helpful for a variety of things including optimising your client’s landing pages or ad campaigns. For example, if a visitor clicks your ad, converts on a landing page and then is redirected to the thank you page where a tag is embedded, the tag would execute. This gives you greater visibility into how your campaigns are performing.
Manually adding these tags to websites requires technical expertise and can be time consuming. Fortunately, Tag Managers help speed up and simplify this process.
What is a Tag Manager?
In many ways, a Tag Manager (otherwise known as Tag Management System (TMS)) is similar to a content management system (CMS). While a CMS lets you create a website without coding, a Tag Manager lets you easily embed, manage and maintain tags without going into the website’s code.
If you’re new to tag management, check out our intro to Tag Manager video.
Now, Event Tracking, in short, is the monitoring of interactions on a website beyond default interactions (e.g. pageviews). Event tracking helps you identify barriers that cause friction, like a form with too many fields causing visitors to bounce off the page before converting.
Check out our Marketer’s Guide to Successful Website Event Tracking for more.
Both tags and Event Tracking can be easily managed in a Tag Manager. Without a Tag Manager, you are wasting billable hours on confusing coding instead of providing positive results for your clients.
Why you need both Event Tracking and a Tag Manager in 2022
Proving your agency’s value and demonstrating results for your clients can be challenging. Although you can use default analytics to track bounce rate, session length and pageviews, these metrics won’t necessarily help when identifying friction points that are costing your clients. You need to be able to understand how visitors are engaging with the website in order to improve it.
That’s why you need tags, Event Tracking and a Tag Manager.
Altogether, you’ll be able to know if a visitor clicks on a button to claim a discount coupon, if products are added to a cart and never purchased and how many people are re-purchasing, for example.
How to take advantage of tags and start tracking events in 2022
1. Use a Tag Manager
If you want to get real results for clients, you need to have the right tools. Manually inputting code and creating individual tags and triggers for each event is time consuming. Instead, you need to use an effective Tag Manager.
A Tag Manager, like Matomo Tag Manager, offers a pain-free solution to embed tracking codes to client websites without needing help from a web developer or someone with technical source code knowledge.
Using a Tag Manager means:
- You can manage all your tags in one easy-to-access place.
- Client websites will load faster – no need for hundreds of tags to get all the insights you need from your website, with a Tag Manager you only require a single tracking code.
- You can reduce risk – rather than adding tags directly to the source code of a website which poses all sorts of risk, a Tag Manager eliminates this risk altogether through its centralised platform.
- You can concentrate on marketing strategies that matter, not the technology that reports on your campaign performance.
Most importantly, it means that all your Event Tracking, tag and trigger data is in one place.
2. Plan overall goals
To successfully implement tags and Event Tracking, you need to set specific, overarching goals.
Remember to make them specific, and to get your clients on board.
To set overall goals, you need to be asking your clients questions like:
- What is your optimal customer journey?
- What part of the funnel do we want to focus on?
- What counts as a conversion for you?
- What is a website health metric vs a growth metric?
All of these can be tracked through an effective tag management strategy with the right events.
Whenever you are building a strategy and deciding which events to track, you need to come back to your clients’ original goals. Does everything you are doing come back to their overall business objectives?
3. Test before going live
Even if you have a Tag Manager, updating code can still disrupt website functionality.
That’s why you need to test tags and Event Tracking before it goes live.
With Matomo, you can preview the tracking system before publishing. That way you can test and ensure that it is tracking the action you defined as the trigger.
Matomo makes it easy to identify any errors and resolve them without requiring help from developers.
4. Track the events that matter
Events can be closely aligned to business objectives. When you know what you want to track, the information collected will have a real impact.
And this will look different for every client you work with.
Depending on your client’s objectives, this could be:
- Visitors signing up to an email list to go through an automated sales funnel
- Increasing the number of new customers reaching the order confirmation page
No matter what events you track, it must be part of a larger strategy. A single event type by itself won’t make a big difference.
5. Visitor segmentation
Now that you know what is happening on your site through Event Tracking, the next step is to drill down a bit further and identify who is taking these actions with Segments.
Segments allow you to divide your website visitors into smaller groups, based on specific criteria that you define, like geographic location, customer type, traffic source, and much more. With this information, you can measure impact, identify patterns and further optimise your clients’ websites.
Let’s say you are working for a B2B SaaS client and you recently launched Industry pages that focus on your client’s niche industries. If you wanted to see the impact these pages have had on the number of purchases, you could quickly set up a segment of visitors who have visited these Industry pages.
Here’s how to segment visitors in Matomo:
1. Open the Segment editor
2. Select “ADD NEW SEGMENT”
3. Set the criteria you want to track.
In the example below, we set our criteria as:
- We first name our segment “Industry”
- Next, we set our filter in the first dropdown menu as “Page URL”.
- Then “Contains” is set as our condition in the second dropdown menu.
- In the third dropdown menu, we select “industry” as our value because we know that our Industry pages contain this in the URLs.
- Then click “SAVE & APPLY”
Once we have our Segment created, we can see how many people have viewed an Industry page and made a purchase.
Final thoughts on using both Tag Managers and Event Tracking
Event Tracking and Tag Managers are both integral parts of marketing. Together, they can give you valuable insights into what is working, what customers want, and how you can help grow and scale your clients’ business in the modern online market.
If you are looking for an all-in-one Tag Manager that lets you track and analyse event data with ease, Matomo is the answer. Matomo’s centralised dashboard and powerful analytics make it easy for marketing agencies to gather data, track growth and help their clients’ websites succeed.
Prove value and deliver results for your clients with Matomo. Try Matomo free for 21 days – no credit card required.
