2023-10-19 | Article | Insights
In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, the ability to track and measure user interactions on your website is paramount. Google Tag Manager has been a game-changer in this regard, offering a centralised platform to manage various tags and tracking scripts. One of its lesser-known but incredibly valuable features is the Tag Coverage Summary. In this article, you will learn what Tag Coverage is, why it matters, and how it can significantly enhance your website's performance and marketing strategies.
Modern websites are a complex web of scripts, tags, and tracking codes. Ensuring that each of these elements works seamlessly and accurately measures the effectiveness of your website can be a daunting task. A misconfigured, malfunctioning or even missing Google tag even on a single page can impact your data analysis, leading to inaccurate insights and poor decisions. This challenge becomes even more apparent when dealing with large and complicated websites. Manually checking the status of the Google tag on all pages of your website is impractical and time-consuming.
Note: The Google tag refers to the gtag.js snippet or Google Tag Manager container that is installed on a page and not the individual tags that are part of a container's configuration.
The Tag Coverage summary provides a solution to this challenge. With Tag Coverage, you can quickly identify which pages have the Google tag correctly implemented and find pages where the measurement is missing. It gives you a comprehensive overview of your website's tagging status, saving you valuable time and ensuring the accuracy of your data. You can access this summary from the Google tag sections of both Google Ads and Google Analytics, and through Google Tag Manager. The Tag Coverage Summary can report on up to 10,000 pages.
The results of using the Tag Coverage Summary are far-reaching. Here's what you can expect:
The Tag coverage summary consists of the "Page details" table, which has columns for "URL" and "Tag status":
The "URL" column shows individual pages from your site (note that it doesn't include query parameters.)
The "Tag status" column shows one of the following statuses for the URL:
You can also click one of the cards above the table to quickly see all URLs with the respective status. If the Tag Coverage discovers a page, you can add this suggestion to your summary permanently, or ignore it to leave it out. Suggested pages are removed from the summary after 60 days of inactivity unless you choose to keep them. The search function allows you to search for a specific URL or multiple URLs in the URL catalogue.
If the summary does not include all of the pages you are expecting, it is also possible to add URLs via the CSV file upload. It can take up to 24 hours to update the status of pages added to the summary.
In conclusion, Tag Coverage in Google Tag Manager is a valuable tool for any digital marketer or website owner. It simplifies the complex task of tag monitoring, saving time, improving data accuracy, and ultimately enhancing your online presence.