Google Tag Manager is a digital tool. It provides a space for one “container” to hold all of the pixels within your tech stack and digital tools. In addition to holding the pixels, it also helps you create goal conversions on your site to feed back into Google Analytics, and custom events (or behaviors that you want to track). It’s a necessary part of true, powerful digital marketing and data analytics.
It holds all of your digital pixels and breaks website behaviors down in a way that you can quantify them. Want to set certain behaviors/actions on your site into trackable goals and events? You can! It’s lets you be a powerful, data-driven digital marketer.
Yes, yes, and yes! It’s free, as are many of Google’s business and digital products!
It not only makes it easier to embed important tags into your website (such as the Facebook pixel), it also makes it easier to manage all of your tags and tool pixels in one location. You login, check your container, and you have a list ready to review/edit/delete.
Digital marketers, entrepreneurs, programmers, web developers, and both small and large companies alike use it for digital marketing tracking and analytics.
There are three main parts to it that allow it to function. Tags, triggers, and variables. Tags are fired when a predefined trigger is initiated. This is identified by a unique variable. These are all held together by the data layer that feeds the variables. More can be read on the Google site.