Google Tag Manager Beginner’s Course on CXL— Review

In my first post on the CXL Digital Analytics course, I had discussed mostly about the introduction part of the course. There the trainers had elaborately laid out how to look at metrics intelligently instead of just staring at them blankly. Taking it forward from there, in this post I will be discussing the merits of the Google Tag Manager basics course, although I did give some introductory insights in the last post as well.

As promised, I will speak about the method for scroll depth measurement using Google Tag Manager. Here’s what the final tag looked like. I am going to walk you through the process step by step now.

In the above diagram, you can see that a new tag was created with the tag configuration as Universal Settings of Google Analytics. After selecting the GA Universal Settings option, you will have to select “Event” from the Track Type dropdown, because obviously, scroll is a type of event.

Don’t worry about the other options — these will be covered in the later courses by CXL and I will give you an update in the upcoming blogs. But for now, just keep in mind that selecting “Event” will suffice. Secondly, there is also the need to select the default Google Analytics settings variable that you must have set up for this container.

Once you are done with this part, select the Category as Interaction and Action as Scroll. Now comes the more tricky part, the label. For this, we have to set up a trigger type called Scroll Depth. And after that, move over to the following settings:

Here, you have to select the Vertical scroll depth (which will be relevant type in most pages; of course, in some cases, you may end up getting horizontal scroll depth as well).

Now what are those numbers you may ask? Here’s what I learned from the course:

10, 25, 50, 75 etc. all represent the percentage of the page scrolled by the user. In other words, the “Depth” of the scroll.

But why each of them? Because the tag will fire separately when the user scrolls to the respective scroll depth. Let us look the data layer (or rather the Data Model) within the Preview/Debug mode in the site with GTM.

Oh, by the way, before we jump into the Preview and Debug mode, let us bear in mind that 3 built-in variables have to be turned on inside Google Tag Manger. These are the following:

Here you can see that after running the preview mode, my Scroll tag has fired 5 times.

The other tags that did not fire, the Test and Form tags, were not supposed to fire, so that’s okay. They were only supposed to fire when someone clicked on the page and clicked on the form submission button the concerned page respectively. Let’s look deeply into the Scroll Tag that DID fire and what actually triggered it and if the values match with the settings in our GTM (well they should, theoretically).

Alright so let’s discuss this point by point. First things first, let us recall from our previous blog post that scroll must be considered as a “non-interaction hit”, which means that Google Analytics is not going to give it a pass while measuring bounce rate. Won’t go deep into this, please refer to my earlier blog entry for this. Next up, we can see that the action defined is “Scroll” which is also fine. Finally, we see that the labels associated are “Scroll Depth Threshold” & “Scroll Depth Units”.

Let’s now look at how the variables look like within a particular Scroll tag fire.

Here you can see that the event defined is “gtm.scrollDepth”. Next, see that the labels we had set up are appearing here too. These have marked in red. This is from one of the projects that I work on in the firm that I work in, so for privacy reason the URLs have been defaced.

As you can see, the bottom 3 are the ones that matter. From Scroll Depth Threshold, we can see that the Data Layer Variable value stands at 50, meaning that it was triggered when I scrolled through 50% of the page.

Here’s the next one for 90 percent page scroll depth.

But this was just the data layer/model. Let us also see what is going on inside the Data Layer.

Before we proceed with decoding the values here, let us look at how to interpret Data Layer broadly. As you can see at the top, this is the summary version. This is the Data Layer configuration at the moment this was viewed. However, as you can see, new values keep getting added and existing variables also have their values updated as and when new triggers get activated. Our scroll related variables are cases in point themselves. See how at Click №12, scroll related variables do not exist anymore. Similarly at Click 11, there is still no scroll variables but notice a difference — gtm.elementUrl now records URL for a particular image on which the click landed (these were random clicks made by me during the preview/debug session). See now for the marked Click events, the corresponding scroll depth data layer variables were “Pushed” into the Data layer along with the respective values (i.e. the percent of scroll)

Wrapping Up:

In this blog, we learned how the scroll tag is set up in GTM successfully as explained beautifully by Chris Mercer in his lesson. I have been using GTM for a while now, but until I had followed his course on CXL, the data layer had never been so clear to me.

In the next blog, I am planning to take up data layer in greater depth, covering two back to back lessons in this part of the Digital Analytics course. In particular, I will focus on how to “push” custom HTML/script into the Data Layer. Additionally, I am also planning to add the discussion of the ecommerce tracking with GTM chapter. As far as learning is concerned, it’s a shame I couldn’t complete the Beginner’s course this week — I will definitely complete the remaining few chapters and also determined to take up the Intermediate course and with some luck, complete it by next week.

To anyone reading, and new to GTM, do note that revision in the early days of the learning process is going to be crucial, as otherwise you will end up getting lost amidst all this.