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How to Use Google Tag Manager to Boost Event Ticket Sales

Google Tag Manager makes it easier to track actions that people take on your event website and ticket sales page, so you know which event marketing efforts are working and which need to be tweaked or eliminated. If you want to increase event ticket sales without wasting money on marketing tactics that aren’t converting visitors into ticket buyers, then you need to track the performance of your efforts. That’s where Google Tag Manager comes into the picture, and it’s now integrated into the AttendStar online ticketing software. It’s a critical ticket sales page feature!

What is Google Tag Manager?

Before you can understand what Google Tag Manager is, you need to understand what a “tag” is. In simplest terms, a tag represents a piece of code that is used to collect data from your website or ticket sales page. The data is sent to a third party service such as Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, your email marketing application, and so on.

If you’ve ever added tracking code from another application, like Google Analytics, to your website or ticket sales page, then you know how it works. You copy the code given to you by the third party application and paste it into a specific place on your website. You have to do this for every little thing you want to track on your website and for every application you’re using. It’s time consuming, easy to make mistakes, and even easier to break something in the tag code or on your website. Sometimes, updates to your website can ruin the tag code entirely (e.g., WordPress theme upgrades).

Google Tag Manager helps solve some of those problems by giving you a single place to manage all of the tags used on your website or event ticket sales page. Rather than manually adding the code directly to your website or ticket sales page for every tag, you add it in Google Tag Manager. You just paste one code from Google Tag Manager into your site instead of a code from every application and for every event that you want to track.

Benefits of Google Tag Manager

One of the key benefits of using Google Tag Manager is that it eliminates a lot of your dependency on developers who cost you time and money to implement tags for you. Instead, you can implement your tags with a few clicks.

Google Tag Manager also saves you time and headaches by streamlining your tasks. You won’t have to generate a tag code for everything you want to track, paste that code in exactly the right place in your site’s HTML, test everything to make sure it’s working, and then log into a different application to get your data – for every different event you track. Instead, you do everything though Google Tag Manager.

Much of the hassle of tracking is reduced with Google Tag Manager. It’s easy to test, debug, and deploy tags quickly. It even improves your page load speed (and Google loves pages that load quickly) because tags are deployed asynchronously, which means a slow loading tag won’t stop other elements of the page from loading. This also improves the user experience on your site. You definitely don’t want to lose ticket sales because your ticket sales page takes too long to load!

Using Google Tag Manager

There are so many ways you can use Google Tag Manager. For example, you can track clicks, page views, downloads, form submissions, purchases, how far someone scrolls down on a page, purchase amount, scroll speed, time spent on a page, and so much more.

Once you create your account, you can create a “container” to hold all of the tags for your website or ticket sales page. When your container is in place, you can start creating tags. A tag tells Google Tag Manager what you want it to do. For example a tag might say, “Send a page view to Google Analytics.” Next, you need to identify “triggers” for your tag, which tell Google Tag Manager when you want it to “fire a tag” (i.e., send information to a specific application). Using the example above, the trigger might be any time someone visits the page.

In other words, Google Tag Manager gives you a single place to manage when your tags should and should not fire, where they should and should not fire, and what the tag should do when it is fired. You can add, remove, edit, or disable tags at any time. You can even test and debug your tags through Google Tag Manager before you publish them to your live site!

Your Next Steps

Keep in mind, Google Tag Manager won’t eliminate the need for developers entirely. It’s easy to use, but if you want to do some advanced tracking, you might need to get help from someone who knows HTML, DOM, and JavaScript.

Get started by learning how to set up tags and triggers. Google Analytics Academy offers a free course on Google Tag Manager, or you can read the Implementing Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager Guide. Google also offers Tag Manager Help which includes a comprehensive set of help documents.

Once you’ve learned the basics, begin with some of the many tag templates and variables that Google has pre-loaded. Next, create some custom tags. Many third party applications, like AttendStar, have set up tags with Google Tag Manager, so you can start using them immediately. If you have any questions about AttendStar’s integration with Google Tag Manager, contact the Help Team at any time.

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