Had to dive back into Google Tag Manager today

A customer called today. They wanted to track the number of times a user had called the number listed on their website.

So I said, Google Tag Manager with Google Ads can work together to track that.

They said “Great, when can I get it?”

Oh boy it has been 6 months or so since I last had to set up any tags in google tag manager. This customer did not even have the google embed codes installed on their site.

So first thing I did was set them up with a new Google Tag Manager “account” in my portal.

This gave me the Google Tag Manager <script> software specific to this customer to add to the header and footer of their site.

So I got permission to log into the back end of their site. I found the section that controls the head and foot to all content on their site and added in the google tag manager tracking codes.

Before you can do this, you need the Google Ad basically user ID and Hash code they give you for tracking phone calls. So I went off to set that up and when I had that ready to go on Google Ad manager, had to update the google tag manager code with the Ad’s code and Hash code.

So had the phone call tracking set up for the customer in Google Ads, And had the Google Tag Manager scripts added to the header and footer of all the pages served up for this customer. So far so good.

It goes pretty quick. I like to use fishbone diagrams for stuff I do only once in a while. A fishbone diagram helps me leverage what I learned last time I did this task as well as avoid pitfalls I got into last time I did the same task.

So I updated their site with the google tag manager code, set up the ads account to track phone calls that are generated by visitors to their site, and now I had to test it.

So there is one more tool for helping with that. The Tag Assistant. I turned that on and then put their site into Preview mode.

Then simply pressed the call button on their site and sure enough, worked out of the gate. The Tag Assistant was showing no issues and the Google Tag Manager debug mode was showing the tags firing on their site.

So now the customer can measure phone calls that are attributable to their website and not some other source like say a paid ad.

Doug Ayers

Lead Software Developer, Mapertunity