Day 38 – Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager
My new friend

I slept fairly well again and was up by around 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep.  I suppose being able to sleep longer or get back to sleep would help me last through the day but I remember reading some days ago that tired was common for many weeks after surgery.

I found a document DaughterA urgently needed for school and did a little shopping and I sent off the business proposal.

I worked with a really cool but esoteric marketing tool from Google that I finally understand the use of. Google Tag Manager.  It is amazing.  Hard to explain but I’ll try.

Most website track some amount of your activity when you are on the site.  Mine does.  Right now.  I don’t know your name but if I looked right now while you read this, there would be a blip showing me where you live and what browser you are using among other things.  (The “where you live” part is limited to the city, not the street address.  Don’t worry too much.  Facebook probably knows where you live, though).

There are many companies that provide technology for these tracking services and for each one, you have to go to your web guru to install it on the website.  The guru being someone like me.

Companies running complex marketing programs may have 10 or more tracking tools, each with different requirements to set up which means a lot of work for the web guru.  But we web gurus are temperamental and slow and sometimes the website gets broken because we do a dumb thing.

As an alternative to this, Google Tag Manager gets installed one time by the web guru.  After that, there is this snazzy control panel on a web page where someone with limited training can more safely install these tracking tools and have them automatically installed on the web site.  This leaves less opportunity for the temperamental web guru to complain about being overworked or to make mistakes.  Plus we are really expensive.

What excites me about it is it is easy to use.  It is tiring to wear the web guru hat all the time.  Sometimes I just want to get something done easily.  This does it.

Dinner tonight is hamburgers and then we drive out to the airport to pick up my Girlfriend for her last visit for a while.  I’ll see her again when I visit Minnesota but that won’t be at least until I’m able to fly which is a couple months away.