Differentiating Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics

Comparing Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics:

• Google Tag Manager does not replace Google Analytics. Instead, it helps users to easily add Google Analytics tracking codes (tags) to your website, deploy GA event code snippets and define rules, when each tag must fire.
• Google Tag Manager is the middle-man of your digital analytics implementation on any website. If you want to add Google Analytics Tracking code or events, it’s recommended to do so with GTM, because you don’t need to do constant changes in website’s code thus deploy changes faster.
• Google Tag Manager can exist without Google Analytics and vice-versa. Your developers can hard-code Google Analytics codes directly to your website. But if you constantly publish need changes, only developers can help you here. While with GTM you could add/edit/remove your Google Analytics Tracking codes all by yourself. You can also use Google Tag Manager to add Facebook, Adwords or any other tracking scripts to your website (leaving Google Analytics behind).
• Google Tag Manager Events are used as triggers which define when a certain tag must be fired. Google Analytics event in this context is a Tag. Example: GTM event “formSubmission” can be used as a trigger to fire a GA event tag called “Form submission”.

GOOGLE TAG MANAGER VS GOOGLE ANALYTICS: EVENTS

In Google Analytics all events are displayed in the event report (Behavior → Events). They often represent interactions that happened on you webpage. The data for this report is populated from Event hits which are sent from your website to Google Analytics’ servers. Prior to birth of Tag Management systems (like GTM) Event hits had to be initiated by small Javascript codes placed in your website. Here’s an example:

1	ga('send', 'event', [eventCategory], [eventAction], [eventLabel], [eventValue]);

As you can see, this snippet of code contains eventCategory, eventAction, eventLabel and eventValue (optional). After a particular action occurs on your website (e.g. user submits “Contact us” form), the Google Analytics Event will be fired and the corresponding data will be passed onto Google Analytics, for example:

1	ga('send', 'event', 'Form submission', 'Contact form', 'https://www.example.com/contact-us');

You can track those events in GA Real-time GA reports.

Now let’s talk about Google Tag Manager events. In order to see them enable GTM’s Preview and Debug mode by clicking little arrow icon near Publish button and then clicking Preview.

After you enable Preview and Debug mode, a large orange notification banner will appear in GTM user interface.

Once the preview mode is enabled, navigate to the site where Google Tag Manager Container code is placed and you will see a debug console window at the bottom of browser showing detailed information about your tags, including their firing status and what data is being processed. On the left side of Preview and Debug console you should see a list of some vague definitions. These, my friend, are Google Tag Manager Events.

They actually play a very important role within GTM –  you can fire your Tags (scripts from various marketing tools) based on these Google Tag Manager events. Here are few examples to make it easier to comprehend:

• A “Pageview” Google Tag Manager Event can be used as a trigger to fire Google Analytics Pageview Tag.
• A “gtm.linkClick” GTM event (which happens when a visitor clicks any link on your website) can trigger a Google Analytics Event Tag (which sends a particular event to GA event reports).
• A “gtm.formSubmit” GTM event (which happens when a visitor submits a form) can trigger another Google Analytics Event Tag (which sends an event with the data of submitted form to GA event reports). “gtm.formSubmit” event can also be used as a trigger to fire a Google Adwords Conversion Tag.
• Since all Google Tag Manager events are populated in Data Layer, you can also ask your developer to fire custom Google Tag Manager events (a.k.a. “Data Layer Events”).

To sum up, Google Tag Manager event is an interaction on your website that is spotted by GTM and then placed in the Data Layer (p.s. Data Layer is automatically created on your website when GTM container code is implemented and published). That interaction on you website can be used as a trigger (condition) to fire your marketing tags (scripts), e.g. Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics Events, Mixpanel Events, Google Adwords Tags, etc.

So as you can see, Google Tag Manager is the middle man in your Digital Analytics implementation. It observes interactions that occur on your website, creates GTM events and then uses them to fire tags (e.g. Google Analytics Event). Although the term Event is the same in both Google products, but in Google Tag Manager a GTM Event is a trigger, while GA Event is a Tag.