 Thanks, everyone, for joining the lightning talk. That was a great preface into this next topic, which is all about Google Tag Manager, how you can improve processes internally, and how you can utilize it for your website. Just a little bit about myself. My name is Stephanie Bernal. I'm a marketing account manager at New Target, Inc., digital agency based out of Virginia. So far, I have about five years of experience working in Google Tag Manager. We work with a lot of clients from B to B, B to C, some nonprofits, government clients, e-commerce clients, all sorts of clients, a lot of them using WordPress for their websites. And then that little furball there is my dog Nala. Very cute. You'd like to hang out. And then I have my contact info at the bottom of the screen. If anyone has any specific questions about how to track something, feel free to send me an email. This will be more of a quick overview of improving those processes, but happy to chat later. All right, so the common theme here for everybody here is you either work in a WordPress site, have a client that's using WordPress. Maybe you're a consultant, contractor, whatever it may be. Your client has a Mar-Tech stack. Smaller clients may be three to five tools. Maybe it's 10 plus tools. Anywhere from analytics, Google Ads, heat map tracking, email marketing, social media, chat bots. I know chat bots are really cool last year, and then they kind of died out. The point being, we all have these tools we need to implement with our website. So the traditional way of doing that is through installing code on your site through a developer, which is fine, especially when it's just like a small set of tools. But once you're growing your Mar-Tech stack, you might have 10 plus tools in growing, right? So what does that do? And just to give a little context here, going through a developer is just fine, but sometimes could be time consuming and a lot of back and forth. So when you have a lot of code on your site, potentially you can start slowing down that website a little bit, which isn't great, right? So why is that important? Because website speed is important, especially nowadays with Google prioritizing co-ed vitals. That being a ranking factor for your website, definitely don't want to bombard with too much HTML on your site that could potentially slow it down. Not saying that that's the total reason why you might slow down a site, but it does contribute. So obviously with website speed, you can provide a better user experience that ultimately contributes to lower bounce rates and also conversions, right? Because at the end of the day, if you have a client or a user that's visiting your site, they're there for a goal, right? They're there to answer a question they may have. They're there to purchase something, sign up for something. So you want to make sure they're able to get to that end goal. And today also, everyone just expects a quick loading site, right? You don't want to go on your mobile phone, try and click a link and accidentally click something else. There's a shift there, right? Because your site's loading too slow. And we all hate those hero image banners that take like 30 seconds to load, right? So website speed being an important factor here. We'll get a little bit into tag manager. I'm sure some of you are already familiar with it. But in case you're not, it's basically a tag management system created by Google. I like to think of it as a home for all your party tools. So instead of adding it to your website through code, you just add the tags within Google Tag Manager. So that's where your house, all your analytics, all your events, all your conversions, and all your third party tools. So why should you use Google Tag Manager? We already talked about it a little bit. Help improve speed on your site. All the third party codes in one place. Less code ultimately results in better performance. And one of my favorites is the reduced need for a development person. No offense to any developers out there. But just talking to you from the marketing perspective and kind of helping bridge that gap between SEO and Dev, I know a lot of the times I'm talking to a developer and they want to do things through the code when you can easily do it yourself through Google Tag Manager. And I know it could be daunting if you're a beginner, you haven't been there yourself yet. But as you get more comfortable with it, it truly is super simple, especially with Google Analytics. You don't need to install any code. All you really need is the analytics ID and you just place it inside a tag, make sure it fires on all the pages and you're done. Versus having the developer install it for you. And then we go into the fact about GA4 when you have, basically you were saying like, you have to move all these events and these conversions into GA4. When you have it installed on your site as code, then you have to go back to the developer, ask them to edit all the code or install additional conversions or whatever it may be. Versus if you already have all these things set up in GA4 for your universal analytics, all the events, all the conversions, all you really need to do is create a new tag and add the GA4 ID in there and then you just apply the triggers that you had already created for all those events and conversions. So ultimately, definitely saves you a lot of time. Super simple. You can go in there, modify as needed, enhance. Honestly, it's definitely a lifesaver. And then also we have recipes. So like I said, for people who aren't as familiar, there's people online that dedicate their time to creating recipes that are basically templates that you can go online, download. It's basically a JSON file and then you just upload it to your Google Tag Manager container. Make sure you modify whatever it is. So for example, we were talking about enhanced e-commerce tracking. There's a recipe for that. All you need to do is make sure you add your analytics ID in there, tweak it a little bit, make sure it goes with the flow of your website, publish it and then you're done. So it literally cuts the time to implement that in half. And yes, you can do it through a plugin. It's preference honestly, but the thing about plugins is you always have to update them, right? Google Tag Manager, you apply it once and you're done. And obviously with all of Google's other tools, it's free. So that's just really the cherry on top for me. No reason why you shouldn't at least give it a try. It definitely does help improve processes. And I know when I've talked to even Google themselves when clients are trying to implement conversion tracking in like Google Ads, they usually ascend some sort of code or something and that's when you can be like, oh, well, you know what, I don't need it. I can install it with Google Tag Manager. So it's definitely helpful. So just some key takeaways and tips here. Obviously, Google Tag Manager can save you from overloading your site with too much code, potentially slowing it down. You can install anything super simple. So when we're talking about basic like tracking, wanna make sure we're tracking things like form fills, signups, I know GA4 already has everything built in. The click tracking, the page views, scroll depth, video engagement and things like that. But when you want more data, you're able to do that yourself. And then the third here is definitely plan before you implement. So for example, if you have, again, an e-commerce client, their end goal is probably revenue. So if you have a nonprofit, maybe it's donations. If you have a government client, maybe it's signups. So things like that, you have to think about what's your clients end goal? What are their KPIs? How are you gonna pull data in that's gonna help them get the bigger picture, right? Cause all this ties back to are your marketing campaigns working or not? So the more data you're able to pull in to analytics through GTM tracking, the more insights you can get and then you can make better informed decisions for your clients. And then last tip here is always test. I know in GA4 they have that debug view as well. That actually came from Google Tag Manager. So when you do implement anything before pushing it live, you're able to test everything from start to finish. I know there's times where I've implemented, for example, like navigation tracking and it ends up tracking something in a footer that might have a common CSS denominator, something like that. So then you have to go back, adjust it, re-test it, send it to someone else to just test if needed, make sure it all works and then from there, then you can push it live and then it'll automatically pull into your analytics data set. So yeah, that's definitely tests. I can't stress that enough. But other than that, I mean, happy to answer any questions on the side here. If anybody has any, feel free to email me. I wish I could show you guys a demo of like a full GTM implementation, but obviously only have 15 minutes. But yeah, that is the end of the slides. So thank you guys very much.