We’re going to go a little techie for a moment and discuss why using Google Tag Manager is really useful for your hotel website and help you increase direct bookings. First we’ll go through what it is and then highlight some reasons why you should be using it.
What is Tag Management?
Modern day websites incorporate a wider variety of services from different providers and within the website code, you can often see all of these being individual loaded to produce the final product. Perhaps you might use all (or at least a few of the below):
• Google Analytics
• Newsletter software
• Custom Fonts
• Live Chat
• Heat mapping software
• Social Sharing tools
• Adwords
• Conversion tracking
• Abandonment capture like Ve Interactive
A tag management system allows you to load all the necessary scripts and tracking codes for all the different services through one single container that packages it all up and loads it efficiently into the website. Google provide exactly this service; the aptly named Google Tag Manager (GTM). Why should we be doing this in a hotel website?
Supercharge Analytics Yourself
A website without a content management system is now pretty much obsolete due to the time and cost inefficiencies of uploading and refreshing content. This has changed the way marketing departments approach digital marketing and we see that DIY systems like GTM actually enhance this. Through an easy user interface, you can add custom triggers such as “number of clicks on the booking button” directly into the website without any programming.
Hotel marketeers can now use this on each campaign that they’re launching to precisely track the ROI and user engagement to create deeper insights into their audience. GTM caters for larger businesses too by offering workspaces to allow multiple members of staff to work on different aspects of the tagging system.
Cost Savings
As GTM takes out the requirement of a developer, you’ll save a good number of expensive hours when it comes to event tracking and insights. With the correct tutorials, you’ll be up and running in no time; setting triggers and values on the required pages throughout your website to gather useful data. There are also a whole host of built in ‘non-google’ tags for your to choose from within GTM, making integrations into other services faster and easier.
Reduces Important Errors
The vast majority of websites will have prolonged little errors resulting in mis-loaded scripts, broken pages etc. While not immediately visible to the untrained users, they do have an impact at the macro level on general usage and page ranking. In the same way that Google Webmaster Tools helps diagnose crawl errors, GTM provides you with debugging before you publish the code on the website. This will ensure you don’t have gaps or issues with your analytics data or third party software. Furthermore, version control (essential for any website) is also offered through GTM and allows you to track changes over time and roll back to any point in time should you need to.
Go Faster!
Loading a large number of scripts in your website is a cumbersome process and will have a significant impact on performance. With users (including Google) expecting lightening fast load speeds, every millisecond you save is hugely valuable. GTM loads scripts asynchronously which means that they load at the same time as each other without waiting for all of them to load in order (synchronously). The easiest way to imagine it is having a motorway with a lane for each script, as opposed to pushing the same number of cars through a single lane on after the other. This results in the scripts loading faster and not acting as a traffic jam for the rest of the website. You may have heard the term render blocking? GTM will load scripts without stoping the website render on the user’s screen.
If you’re interested in a tutorial in GTM then get in touch with our friendly team and we’ll be happy to assist!