Google Analytics' main job is really just generating the reports and statistics about your website, like how many people saw your website yesterday, what web browser they used, which pages were the most popular, etc. The only way it can know this stuff is if you put a "tag" on all of your pages. The tag is the javascript code on your pages that runs on the visitor's browser, which tells Google Analytics' servers that they are visiting the page right now.
There's no problem if you just want to put the tag in the master file of your website so it shows up on all of your pages. Google Analytics can use the "referrer" parameter to figure out which page the visitor is on and can do all the simple stuff like counting page views.
However, you may want to track how many people use a specific feature. Maybe you want to group certain pages together or count some similar but different URLs as being the same page. Now you need unique tags for all these different features and groups of pages so Google can identify which feature or type of page got used or visited. Now it's complicated! You have multiple tags, and you only want the tags to "fire" sometimes (e.g. don't fire unless they click this button or use this feature.)
Google Tag Manager makes it easier to manage this mess of tags by letting you define rules for when your tags should fire. It also lets you test your tags to make sure they go off when you load the right page or click a certain button. This is done by putting the Tag Manager's code on your website instead of the actual tags, and as Crayon's answer points out, the tag manager outputs the tags for you. This gives you another cool benefit: you can change your tags and the way they work without actually changing the source code of your website (which you may not be able to do because of slow-release cycles) -- instead you just change it from the Google Tag Manager website, and it will spit out different code on your pages dynamically when they're loaded in the visitor's browser.
Google Analytics' main job is really just generating the reports and statistics about your website, like how many people saw your website yesterday, what web browser they used, which pages were the most popular, etc. The only way it can know this stuff is if you put a "tag" on all of your pages. The tag is the javascript code on your pages that runs on the visitor's browser, which tells Google Analytics' servers that they are visiting the page right now.
There's no problem if you just want to put the tag in the master file of your website so it shows up on all of your pages. Google Analytics can use the "referrer" parameter to figure out which page the visitor is on and can do all the simple stuff like counting page views.
However, you may want to track how many people use a specific feature. Maybe you want to group certain pages together or count some similar but different URLs as being the same page. Now you need unique tags for all these different features and groups of pages so Google can identify which feature or type of page got used or visited. Now it's complicated! You have multiple tags, and you only want the tags to "fire" sometimes (e.g. don't fire unless they click this button or use this feature.)
Google Tag Manager makes it easier to manage this mess of tags by letting you define rules for when your tags should fire. It also lets you test your tags to make sure they go off when you load the right page or click a certain button. This is done by putting the Tag Manager's code on your website instead of the actual tags, and as Crayon's answer points out, the tag manager outputs the tags for you. This gives you another cool benefit: you can change your tags and the way they work without actually changing the source code of your website (which you may not be able to do because of slow-release cycles) -- instead you just change it from the Google Tag Manager website, and it will spit out different code on your pages dynamically when they're loaded in the visitor's browser.
GA is the analytics tool that provides reports about activity on your site. GTM is a tag manager that can output tags based on defined rules. So for example, you can either implement your GA code on your site directly, or you can implement the GTM code and use GTM to output the GA code.
The main benefit of GTM (or any tag manager worth anything) is that you can use it for multiple tags or code snippets or pretty much anything you want. Usually you implement a data layer and a set of rules, and then within the tag manager interface, put a new tag or code snippet under those rules, using stuff from the data layer. That way for example, if you use GA today and then tomorrow want to also implement a different analytics tool e.g. Adobe Analytics, you can just do it within the GTM interface following the same rules and data layer you setup already.
So IOW GTM is a container in which to output other stuff. GA is one of the "other stuff" you'd output.
Definitive answer regarding Google Tag (GT-) vs Google Analytics (G-) and Google Ads (AW-) - Google Ads Community
Google Tag Manager / Google Analytics - No Code?
Yes, you can utilise those native DOM events assuming:
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You can readily identify the elements in question in the page DOM. ie: are there ID attributes on the buttons you want to track?
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You only want to track these 'simple' events, and not 'custom' events.
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You do not need to expose any backend data to GTM/GA.
At that level of complexity GTM can more or less be a point and click kind of set-up.
More on reddit.comGoogle Tag Manager and Adobe Analytics
Adobe has its own tag management system called Dynamic Tag Management (or DTM). Not entirely sure if it comes free with Adobe Analytics or its an add-on product, but it should be able to do everything GTM can do.
More on reddit.comSetting up Google Tag Manager and Analytics correctly
Is Google Analytics part of Tag Manager?
What's the difference between GTM and GTAG?
Can you use GA4 without GTM?
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I installed linkedin and twitter tags in google tag manager for all pages.
I don't know why I did that or why it's important.
Can someone explain it to me like I'm 5? Very grateful for any feedback.
Hugs