Imagine your website is a physical store. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is like an advanced "camera system" that observes visitors when they enter your store and notifies your "partners" (such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Meta) about what those visitors do. For example, GTM can simply notify when a visitor arrives or provide more detailed insights, like tracking the areas they visit, the products they view, the items in their cart, or whether they complete a purchase or submit a form. However, it’s important to note that GTM itself does not analyze the data. Instead, it enables the tools you connect to it—like Google Analytics or Facebook Ads Manager—to perform the analysis and give you insights. Think of GTM as the messenger, not the decision-maker. The great part? Instead of installing a separate system for each of your partners, you install one GTM system and configure it to notify all your tools as needed. How GTM Works: Tags: Tags are the connections between GTM and your partners. Each tag sends specific information (like clicks, purchases, or video plays) to tools like Google Analytics or Meta Ads. Triggers: Triggers are the actions you want to monitor, such as a visitor clicking a button, submitting a form, or scrolling down a page. Variables: Variables are like reusable templates or placeholders for information. For example, you can store your Google Analytics ID in a variable and reference it across multiple tags. If the ID changes, you only need to update the variable once, and all related tags will update automatically. To set it up, you install a JavaScript tag on your website. Then, by configuring triggers, tags, and variables, you can track visitor behavior and share that data with the tools you use to analyze it. More on reddit.com

The two are not competing products, they are complementary. Analytics is where all of your data lives. Google Tag Manager allows you to, quite literally, manage the tags that allow you to collect various bits of information from your site, and port that data into Analytics. Analytics on its own is pretty flat. There are all kinds of charts you can pull up to show all kinds of data that's collected by default, but that default info isn't always the most useful depending on what you're hoping to measure exactly. With GTM you can create all kinds of custom events and conversions which you can track in Analytics so that your data tracking is built for your own unique needs. In my position now, I not only have GA and GTM data to work with, but also HubSpot and Salesforce. All of these have different functions and purposes within our ecosystem, and combined, we can get a full and complete picture of how we're acquiring new business, how much it costs us to acquire new business, and use that data to inform marketing decisions (how and where we want to spend our money to get the best ROI possible). More on reddit.com

It is something web developers use to manage all the trackers and libraries that they use. When you look at certain things or do certain things on a page (move mouse, scroll, some typing and clicks) the developer wants to record that as an event so that they can analyze what users do. Google Analytics, Omniture, Amplitude and a bunch of other systems collect and store these events for different kinds of analysis. Rather than do everything several times (once for each type of analysis they want), they can just use the tag manager and have it sort everything out so it all works neatly. As a user it makes little difference, you are still being watched and tracked as much as ever, just the web page code is cleaner! (I think this is correct but please correct me if I got it wrong - it had been almost a decade since I touched this stuff). More on reddit.com

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