Google Tag Manager: Ecommerce Integration

Believe it or not, on average an US ecommerce website has between 15-20 marketing tags. Implementing and maintaining these many marketing tags on your website is often a cumbersome job. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a great tool for marketer as well as developers. Like any other Tag management solution (TMS), GTM not only decouples deployment of these marketing tags but also introduces an efficient way of sharing data to these tags via data layer. A best practice-driven GTM implementation can save hundred of hrs of your time. Most importantly GTM is free and equally powerful as any other enterprise tag management solution in the market.

Tag and vendor independent implementation

In a series of articles, I will show you how you can integrate your ecommerce store with Google Tag Manager (GTM). Approach introduced in this series is tag and vendor independent, and creates necessary re-usable infrastructure which can support any tag provided by any vendor. For this series, I have created a demo ecommerce store which can be accessed here. If it helps I am more than happy to provide view only access to GTM container used as part of this series, just shoot me an email.

Prerequisites

1. A good understanding of JavaScript and HTML.
2. A Google Tag Manager account and at least one GTM container

Customer journeys covered

We want to approach this implementation based customer journeys. For each step in customer journey we will identify appropriate data and pass it to GTM using data layer object. In a nutshell, GTM data layer holds the key for a re-usable, flexible and efficient GTM implementation.

Articles in this series

This is work in progress, keep watching this space for upcoming articles.

1. Google Tag Manager: How it works