Digital Marketing

Google Tag Manager Vs Google Analytics - Understanding The Difference Between The Two Popular Tools 

By Muhammad Hanzla Ijaz

Posted on: October 21, 2022 8:45 AM

I was a little puzzled when I first learned about Google Tag Manager (GTM). Since I was ignorant of the existence of tag management at the time, I naturally wondered, “What is Google Tag Manager?” What distinguishes GTM events from Google Analytics events? Later, I studied all of what constitutes on either side of Google Tag Manager Vs Google Analytics in detail.

And I still see this pattern of confusion among many newcomers today. I’ll outline the key distinctions between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics in this blog article.

I’ll compare Google Tag Manager versus Google Analytics and show you the differences, as well as when and how to use each of them to your benefit.

Moreover, you will get to know the reasons why people frequently confuse them, and how you may use either one or the other as part of your marketing strategy.

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager allows you to create and manage your tags for conversion tracking, website analytics, remarketing, and other purposes. Google Tag Manager offers simple, dependable, and cost-free tag management solutions.

Tag manager allows you to provide rules for when your tags should activate, which makes it easier to manage this tangle of tags. It also enables you to test your tags to make sure they activate when the appropriate page loads or a specific button is clicked. 

Google Analytics

Its primary function is just to generate reports and statistics about your website, such as the number of visitors you had yesterday, the type of browser they were using, the most popular pages, etc.

Furthermore, you can add Google Analytics as a tracking tool to your website or mobile application. User information like pageviews and session data will be collected. For this, you may later evaluate for making better business and analytical decisions within the Google Analytics interface.

To begin, you must add a tracking code to your website or mobile application. This code will measure user data and send it to the Google Analytics platform.

It is important to note for business persons that Google Analytics 4 is a significant system enhancement that was announced in October 2020. [1]

Major Differences between Google tag manager and Google Analytics.

Discover and Manage:  

Google Analytics functions to track data, store it, and produce reports about your website. for example

Google Analytics allows you to discover the following:

  • How much money was made on your website in the last 15 days?
  • Which parts of your website received the most traffic?
  • Which products were the most popular during the past week?
  •   Which marketing strategy brought in the most visitors to your website?
  • What are your store’s best-selling products?

There is no issue if you only want to use the GA tag to track general data like page visits, bounce rates, session lengths, referrals, etc. on all websites.

But sometimes, You might wish to keep track of how frequently a certain function on your website or app is used. Or perhaps you want to check up or track on sales. In this situation, you must add custom tags.

Google Analytics events only transmit information when a website visitor performs a specific action. Form submission would make a fantastic example here.

What do you do here then? You are going to ask the developer to add that form submission tracking tag (directly in the code) to a website. But what happens when you want to use Google Analytics to track tens or hundreds of interactions? To save your developers time and your money, you must lookup for better solutions.

Google Tag Manager makes it easy to handle this mess of tags by allowing you to specify when specific tags should fire. 

Being a tag management tool, Google Tag Manager can provide this information. You can just add, update, enable, deactivate, or delete tags from the website or app using a tag management solution.

Queries: 

In Google Analytics, you can query data using the reporting window or the API. On the other hand, data querying is not possible with Google Tag Manager.

Data source:
Google Tag Manager is not a source of data but it is a data management tool that makes it possible to move data across different data sources. There is no data stored on it.

On the other hand, Google Analytics is a data source that collects a variety of data on a website, its users, activities, and devices using dimensions and metrics.

Google Tag Manager Vs Google Analytics – Which one is the tracking tool? 

Google Analytics is a tracking tool, and Google Tag Manager is just a bridge between your website and the tracking tool.

Tracking codes:

Google Tag Manager enables you to control different Javascript tracking codes, sometimes referred to as Tags, on your website. One of the tags is the tracking code for Google Analytics.

Why there is Confusion between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics?

They are both Google products, and they are both free to use!

However, Google Analytics’s actual implementation is what’s confusing it. While Google Tag Manager is a popular method for installing Google Analytics, you may also install Google Analytics directly on your website.

Installing the code directly on your website makes perfect sense if Google Analytics is the only tracking service you use.

However, you can also install Google Tag Manager on your website and link your Google Tag Manager account to your Google Analytics account if you use various tracking technologies or wish to use more intricate tracking events.

Although the setup is a little more challenging, it offers you more sophisticated tracking possibilities and is more adaptable with a variety of tools.

In theory, you could have Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics installed.

Two distinct products can lead some marketers to believe they need both, which would be a terrible execution and lead to inaccurate data.

It doesn’t matter which implementation you use; it only depends on your tracking strategy.

Conclusion 

We should now be clear on the differences between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics and how to use each.

You might add your Google Analytics tracking code straight to your page without using Google Tag Manager.

If you intend to use additional Tags, such as the Facebook Pixel or the Adobe Analytics Tag, you could also install Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager.

In essence, Google Tag Manager serves as a liaison between the tracking technology (Google Analytics) and the implementation on your website.

Because they are both free and provide various benefits for your business, I advise using both products.

Google Tag Manager Vs Google Analytics — Frequently Asked Questions

Can Google Tag Manager replace Google Analytics?

Google Tag Manager is not a replacement for Google Analytics. It serves as a bridge between your website and the monitoring tool.

Is Google Tag Manager hard?

If you don’t have any technical experience or training, using Google Tag Manager is not “simple”. To understand it, you must have some technical knowledge.

Do I need both Google Analytics and Tag Manager?

It is possible to utilize Google Tag Manager without Google Analytics. Each must be set up separately in order to be used in conjunction. Both tools have the potential to benefit your company in various ways.

Also Read:

References 

[1] 5 Ways Teams Can Use Google Analytics To Improve Business – Forbes