Pros and Cons: Using Google Analytics and Tag Manager
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Google provides strong tools, but the implementation of those capabilities is frequently (and typically) incorrect. The following is a list of both the benefits and drawbacks of using Google Analytics and Tag Manager (GA/GTM).
Pros
The GA and the GTM are both free: The only expense to you will be all of the data on the activity of your website, as well as your advertising budget, and your return on investment (ROI) per customer.
The GA may be set up in fewer than 15 minutes and is quite simple to do so. Setting up even the most fundamental of GTM reports may be done in fewer than 15 minutes.
There is a variety of information and resources that may be used to help general accounting and general ledger management.
You can achieve visibility and gain insights with GA/GTM without having to build your own reporting infrastructure.
You have the opportunity to tailor GA/GTM to meet your specific requirements.
When it comes to generating reports, GA/GTM gives you the capability to quickly interact with Google’s Big Query as well as other cloud services.
GA doesn’t require any custom code to implement. In the vast majority of cases, all you have to do to integrate Google’s code into the code of your website is copy and paste. Using plugins, content management systems like WordPress and Wix give you the ability to accomplish this task in a brisk and uncomplicated manner.
Cons
While it is simple to set up GA, setting up GTM to get precise tracking might be more challenging. When it comes to supporting the insights that GTM promises, a significant amount of specialized coding and integration is typically required.
If the code is not implemented appropriately, GTM has the potential to generate errors. If a user, for instance, clicks the refresh button on a particular page or the back button while they are on a page that is being tracked, then this will result in duplicate tracking.
You are able to “track” the value of a conversion using GA and GTM; however, the default implementation of this is a hardcoded amount, which does not take into account the quality of the lead based on the information that you know about them. For instance, if a person fills out your lead form, you are able to assign a value of $100 to that action; but, this does not take into consideration the fact that the person may have entered a junk email address, may have never opened your email, or may not be a qualified lead.
Generally speaking, GA and GTM have a tendency to exaggerate the value of their own SCO and advertising. If you have an ad campaign on your brand-name search, for instance, to prevent other businesses from getting a head start on you, then the cost per add and lead is substantially cheaper than the cost of other kinds of keyword-driven campaigns. To put it simply, it will cost you less if someone is looking for you specifically by name.
GA provides you with generalized information as well as an overall picture of the performance and outcomes of your website; but, it is lacking in a lot of the specific nuances that can assist you in producing and managing content more effectively. For instance, if high-quality leads typically visit three particular pages on your website and then complete your lead form after viewing one of these pages, then the conversion is related to the most recent page they visited, and it is not necessarily correlated to the combination of how effective these three pages specifically are. With this level of detail, you will be able to create recommended articles that will point to the other two pages, which will assist you in guiding people through the consideration process on your product or service, which will result in a statistically higher probability of conversion. Statistically, this will lead to more sales.
GA is mostly concerned with the remaining 99% of issues that exist on your website. If you are generating traffic and pushing people to your homepage, you will see a significant amount of abandons from individuals who found you via the use of the incorrect search keyword or found you through the use of the incorrect keyword set up. These visitors get to your homepage but then exit without doing anything further.
It is difficult to determine in GA which particular keywords, articles, and ads are responsible for conversions across different campaigns.
If a consumer uses a tracking blocking plug-in, a private browsing solution such as Duck Duck Go, or proxy servers that block ad tracking, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager will not work for that customer.
You are need to give Google with the aforementioned information in order to obtain accurate reports across numerous advertising campaigns. For all intents and purposes, this indicates that in order to effectively analyze ROI on your campaigns, you will need to transmit both your Facebook advertising campaign and your budget to Google. To say you have excellent information to sell you more Google advertising would be an understatement.
You won’t be able to correlate actual website activity to a prospect or conversion if you don’t have Google Tag Manager (GTM) installed. You are able to view this information if GTM has been installed and configured properly; nonetheless, it is simple to obtain duplicated and erroneous results in this section.
Because it is against the terms and conditions of Google to retain personally identifiable information (PII) in GTM, such as a person’s name or email address, you will need to connect the data from GA and GTM into your CRM system in order to link a person to a specific website experience.
The traffic that is generated by scrapers and bots is not filtered out by GA.
GA/GTM (and other tracking such as Facebook Ad Conversion Tracking, Bing Ad Conversion Tracking, etc.) needs to be the first information loaded on your page in order for it to function successfully. This can frequently come at the expense of performance for your end-users.
The process by which GA measures and attributes referral traffic and campaigns is fraught with a great deal of subtlety. Campaign attribution also follows the rules of sessions. This means that if a potential customer comes in on one blog article and then comes back later through either a brand-name search or a retargeting ad, then the most recent article is attributed with the lead source. This does not necessarily mean that the most recent interaction was the first interaction with the lead.
Establishing and maintaining an accurate reporting system for tracking consumer information across many domains is a tough task.
To make successful use of this tool, you need a high degree of technical competence. Additionally, GTM needs a lot of attention and maintenance in order to stay current with the changes that occur on your website and in the content it contains.
Alternative Methods
We considered integrating Google’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as part of our minimum viable product (MVP). However, we discovered that the data that Google provides is quite restrictive and cannot be linked to actual customer activity.
Our Website Analytics make use of the raw data from your website in order to precisely determine which pages correspond to conversion, determine which adverts are bringing in quality leads, and measure the return on investment (ROI) of every marketing asset and collateral that you develop.
On the market today you may find various open source website analytics tools in addition to Atlas AI, which analyzes data from websites. Before handing over all of your data to Google, which in exchange offers very little in return, it is in your best interest to investigate the options that are now accessible.
