Tags are segments of code provided by analytics, marketing, and support vendors to help you integrate their products into your websites or mobile apps. With Google Tag Manager, you no longer need to add these tags directly to your projects. Instead, you configure and publish tags and how they fire from within the Tag Manager user interface.
Tag Manager natively supports many Google and third party tag configurations. These are available in the form of various tag template types, which can be used across the web, as well as Android and iOS. Learn more about Supported tags and where you can use them.
Custom tags may be used to implement tags that are not yet supported by Tag Manager's native templates. You can also create and share your own tags using custom templates, which allow you to write your own tag and variable definitions. Learn more about Custom templates and how you can use them.
Tags in the digital marketing and analytics context are similar to, but distinct from, the standard HTML tags that developers will use to code web pages. The analytics version of the word "tag" is derived from the fact that the tags provided by vendors are often encapsulated by HTML <script> or <img> tags.
When we speak of tags in an HTML context, we refer to tags such as <body>, <p>, <li>, <blockquote>, and so on. When we refer to tags used in the analytics and marketing industry, we refer to code that an organization provides to install the desired product or functionality on your website or mobile app.
Benefits
By adding and using tags, you can send data from your website to linked Google product destinations to help you measure the effectiveness of your website and ads. You can easily add natively supported tags to your website to start measuring the ads performance of your website or online store.
As website technologies like cookies continue to evolve due to privacy, browser and regulation changes, having high-quality, site-wide tagging across your website is important to help ensure that you’re getting the most accurate measurement.
You can use Tag Manager's web-based user interface to set up tags, and establish triggers that cause your tags to fire when certain events occur. Learn more about Tag firing options and how to use them.