Mastering Google Tag Manager with Julian Juenemann of MeasureSchool

Google tag manager is kind of a no code solution where you will be able to say I want to send this data over to Facebook this data over to Google ads this data over to Google analytics and that makes it really powerful because it keeps it all clean and keeps it in an interface that um also other people will be able to utilize once they're once there's a switch over for example from a company you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast

with John Wright brought to you by statsro hi my name is John and this is the affiliate bi podcast and we have a special guest today Julian junaman from measure school and I'm going to pass it over to Julian to tell us what you do with measure School all right thanks for having me John um yeah measure school is the prime destination online to learn all about the fun tools of analytics such as Google analytics Google tag manager and data Studio kind of the Google stack

uh if you want it to be so but at the same time we help marketers out with data a ton how to think about it that Google analytics oftentimes their first entry point so we help them out to get started with these tools and then hopefully grow from there to optimize their decision making their business and their websites and I think your school has been around for close to 10 years and when it came out I probably should have paid attention to it and I'm going

to lead into it's kind of like maybe a topic or a discussion or question which is I mean I shouldn't be intimidated by data but I think people get lazy and I think there's a lot of reasons why people don't jump into the space of what your school does which is helping people go left to right so they can get comfortable with data and I think maybe we're at a time where people realize if they don't do this now they're it's they're going to be left

behind it's kind of like learning the basics of the internet so I just wanted to get your take on what you experience I mean your job is to get people to come to your school but you have to make it welcoming where you really do help them uh you know gain those skills and just how important they are yeah it's it's kind of a realization of many marketers out there that there that there that um as you said it's kind of the basics of the the

internet almost um once you get into digital marketing you realize very quickly that it's not just about making fleshy banners or coming up with cool ideas but we have the ability on the internet to measure certain areas of users interacting with our product with the marketing that we do and that can be so powerful because it can lead to you making better decisions optimizing your ads for example or your whole campaign strategy and why people don't um dive in earlier is always a yeah a questionable

point for me you kind of need to realize that how powerful it can be be be um I think some of the marketing forms are more predestined to be disrupted or be used with data for example Performance Marketing such as Google ads um really easily you can see if you don't know the data behind it you can basically burn a lot of money and therefore it's it's a little bit easier to know that you need to get the grips with data and at the same time

other marketing forms can use data as well and other digital marketing forms and for for those people I always say um well it is it is kind of a maturity thing at the beginning you might be trying to get your SEO set up and just get traffic to your website but once you hit that point where you're doing pretty well traffic is coming to the website but does it actually convert all of these questions then come up and data can be really really helpful the there

so we kind of try to help people out to find that realization point where they'll be able to say hey this data helps me to make decisions and this is actually what I would need in order to optimize my business or make my websites better and for every marketer that's that's a little bit um different but yeah um that's why I'm a really big fan of giving people the realization of what they need to measure and how they can use that data later on to make

decisions Okay and like in my own experience I probably have ignored Google tag manager for far too long I'm just getting involved in it and I'm realizing what kind of power exists from it both on so many avenues like whether it's being an affiliate marketer and relying on SEO um is quite obvious in the the PPC space that's pretty important uh affiliate programs is becoming a bit more Dynamic and you know we're a SAS company now and Google tag manager seems to be everywhere we go

um what are people missing like why should they pay attention to Google tag manager like what what is missing like how can they they use this to amplify you know what they're doing for maybe let's put PPC off the side but just focus more on that SEO affiliate marketer just getting off the ground um yeah tell us yeah sure um I think that first of all if we Define Google tag manager as a tag management system but it kind of uh slots quite in well into

a measurement strategy whereas Google tag manager is the first part where where you install the tracking actually that's where you get the data from and it gets sent from your website to your marketing vendor it could be Google analytics from Google analytics you actually can gather the data and then get the insights from and in the data Studio you would visualize it and maybe convince somebody with it so just taking that into consideration when we talk about this first part of measuring the data traditionally a

lot of people have just learned about Google analytics 4 or their Facebook pixel or whatever or their affiliate program that they want to install and they get a little code from their marketing vendors and they need to install that on their website and therefore and therefore um then oftentimes need to ask a developer or need to set this up themselves through a plugin that's how it was traditionally done with Google tag manager you can now take one Central snippet of code that we place on the

website and this gives us a complete interface a graphical interface where which two we can install our codes on our website and this brings a lot of power with it because now you it's all about really customizing your installation getting the data that is specific to you so whereas a tracking code itself will probably just check your whole website and the page use with a tag management system like Google tag manager you'll be able to track certain interactions that are only available maybe on your page

such as button clicks ad clicks for example or if somebody Scrolls down your page and so on these are all these little customizations that I think make analytics really powerful because only if you have the data that is specific to your business to your purpose of your website the more specific will be the insights and the data that you get in the ga4 OR in inside of your other systems that you want to send that data to so Google tag manager can really help you hone

in and customize installations so where I think people are maybe missing out on is well it is fine to just install Google analytics for or install your analytics tools on your website just by pasting code or using a plugin once you are Beyond a certain point where maybe you just want to gather traffic or you just want to know how many people are on your website once you start asking real questions such as how does a certain feature or how do people navigate my website to

and how does that influence my conversion how many people click on my ads for example that might be already a question that you then cannot answer with a default setup and you need to start customizing and there is where Google tag manager really comes in and professional companies have been using it uh one to customize the tracking but second really also to keep their code bases a little bit bit bit um separated from everything they do in marketing and what they do on the website in

terms of feature sets and so on now they have the ability to implement this themselves via a tool like Google tag manager yeah I think what you're saying is interesting that there's actually a lot of companies that are basing everything they do on tag manager because it's so powerful it's so Central and it really simplifies everything where you don't have to build that tracking system and it's just ready to go yeah from from my side I must say that that that um I wouldn't touch a

analytics installation if there would be no tag management installed because then I it's up to me to go into the code and figure certain things out Google tag manager is kind of a no code solution where you will be able to say I want to send this data over to Facebook this data over to Google ads this data over to Google analytics and that makes it really powerful because it keeps it all clean and keeps it in an interface that also other people will be able

to utilize once there once there's a switch over for example from a company I got a question that's more to do with your actual school so let's pretend someone is an affiliate marketer they're Vaguely Familiar with the Google analytics for and they're kind of looking at the stuff going I know I need to learn this how much time is involved like what would you say someone needs to invest to say they get comfortable learning the basics and then getting comfortable where they can say okay you

can learn these insights by by being skilled uh with these tools yeah I couldn't really put a time frame on it obviously we help people out from going from beginner to somebody who implements uh tracking and and gets insights for clients um as well so this would be like a freelancer path this will can take um several months I would say that it goes really hand in hand with what you're doing the best learning experience is when you are applying your knowledge right away to the

field that you're actually working in so if you're an affiliate marketer and you're trying to prop up your website on SEO there is a lot of insights to be gained from a Google analytics 4 about how users are behaving on your website itself where the traffic is actually coming from and um certain other things like your conversions uh how you can track for example your affiliate clicks as well so once you learn how to set this up and get very customized data for your system right

then you start asking questions and that's what I want to get the the the student oftentimes to to ask the first really good question that says okay I have these tracking techniques available I have this data available now I have this question but I don't have the tracking in place yet and the data is also not yet in place yet so how can I build in the right tracking for me to find out what this question actually means how can I then look at the data

and analyze the data and get hopefully to the insights and the answers that that I would like to have in order to optimize my funnel my website my business business business and these are things that are very very individual per business right so it's not something that um you could put a time frame on and say um now you have learned analytics because it's so different per per um per business that you have in front of it like for me I um learned probably the ropes

mostly on e-commerce websites but then went on uh lead generation is a completely different business model in itself and things different things to model and to track and then there are um affiliate websites there are gaming websites there are many different uh business models out there and purposes of websites so they need a individual individualized tracking approach and that's what um it really comes down to um obviously you're in the the time space where Google analytics 4 ga4 is being pushed on everyone to migrate over

uh what do you think a lot of Affiliates are not doing well when it comes to looking at their analytics data like everyone can put this on their site but I think there's a lot of people that that they don't simply pay attention to this whether it's looking at the data daily or they're not able to know what they can actually dig for so in my experience when I used to do SEO Consulting it's um not to say that you know I was always on top

of this whole space but there's just a lot of people they don't look at this they don't know what to do and it's uh I think they they really need a basic you know Google analytics 101 yeah I think that um if you are thinking and now here's the case um you're an affiliate and you get your most of your traffic through SEO right I think at the beginning it's probably your number one priority to really get a lot of traffic onto your website and see

if the business actually works so you get your clicks and you sell uh few items and so on now then you probably are hooked and want to get more positions on Google and expand from there and that's obviously something that you can optimize and optimize and you don't necessarily need analytics for it but at some point it gets to that Ram where you do micro optimizations and really want to keep the user on your website so it doesn't go back to Google and clicks on your

competitors result for example so there you are then asking questions about the entry point on your website how do people come to my website which websites which sites do they actually use so what is the landing page here how long do they stay on the landing page maybe how many people are bouncing from the landing page and going straight back to Google or how are people then navigating through and where do they actually click on the ad on that a call to action that goes over

to your partner website and these are things that Google analytics won't be able to tell you right away when you are just installing the default thing you need to have a customized approach and therefore I think once you get into that realm that it's a little bit more advanced you are then um needing to optimize and customize your installation and well um one one part of that is getting the right data in Google tag manager and the other part is then looking at that data on

a regular basis and that's also I guess a a one-on-one thing um if you are not paying attention yet to your Google analytics apart from maybe traffic data that is coming to your website and how many people came from Google um it's worth to start asking more and more questions and trying to dig into the data because that's that's then a habit that you need to get into to really dig for data and dig for the insights insights insights now we're talking about you know getting

more experience with ga4 and Google tag manager and obviously around the corner you've already mentioned uh Google data Studio which is uh people call it looker and yeah data studio and I've seen some seos where they start building their own custom dashboards and I think some of these dashboards are really good for site owners that maybe they're intimidated by all the stuff like you know getting their hands dirty and working with that j4 um what are you seeing uh as interesting dashboards like uh I guess

with your courses you teach people how to build these dashboards and what kind of insights do you think people can gain from it Beyond just you know having that experience of looking inside you know yeah I think um the dashboards are really really great when it comes to data sharing and liberating that data so if you are maybe on your own working on your site maybe Google data studio is I call it the Google data Studio it is Luca studio now um so I would look

at Studio you will be able to uh um have something a little bit more pretty and maybe also simplified right so Google analytics itself ga4 is quite overwhelming when once you go in because there's so many buttons so many reports that you can set up and if you are just looking at traffic data or just looking at your SEO data how much traffic you got from that maybe you need to go through three or four menu points in order to find that data and every time

you kind of need instructions to to find that data that said you can build a Luca Studio dashboard and there's local Studio dashboard will then be a canvas that you can design however you want and I'm a big fan of customizing this there are tons of templates out there yes and some of them are really great and some of them really have a purpose right away and you can get really quick insights from it but um often they are not really customized to your needs again

right if you ask certain questions and you are interested in certain things why do you need five other visualizations on a dashboard you would then need to take the template and customize again so that's why I'm kind of of of um a big a fan of thinking about what data do I actually need to have on there and what I the questions that I basically want to answer and then put these on your Luca Studio dashboard and then you can also liberate that data and share

it out to others and that's a great way to convince other people of data as well so if you have a bigger organization and you work with other people and you want to tell them about the change that you want to make in the business but you also want to underlie it with data Luca studio is a really great tool because the person who has view rights to the Luca Studio dashboard doesn't necessarily have to have access to Google analytics itself so you can use Google

analytics as a data source but you don't have to give all the access to all of the data to that person and that might be useful if you have an email marketing team and you just want to give them even marketing data or an SEO team and they should see the SEO data obviously yeah so so it's a really great tool to filter and give people access on many different funds yeah you literally answer my next question which is uh can you build templates to standardize

this and in my experience in trying to put together a bunch of dashboards I realize you're exactly right uh every one situation is different and you can't just look at the data the same because what means something on my site is not really cloneable for everyone else I I mean the templates are great for sharing and learning but um I think I've realized that uh there's no one template fits all it just kind of builds your templates and you know maybe having the experience of knowing

what you can share and you're right about having to share that with like a board or management or different parts of your team to see what they can get and one other thing I guess Luca studio is a Google tool yes but it doesn't only connect to Google analytics for it also connects with third-party connectors with the help of third-party connectors to your affiliate program you could pull data down um about your sales you can import data from Google Sheets from databases and so on so

it's a really great tool to unify data as well so you'll be able to not only use your ga4 data how much traffic do I get but also how many sales do I get and how does this Stack Up in relation so it's a really great tool to get all the data together in one place and hopefully only have one tool to log into yeah you're actually uh these are some questions that we're having from just a discussion they're not written down but you're already thinking

ahead of what next question would be which is Blended data it's I believe there's a lot more power that can be had when you start taking multiple sources and blending that and I'm wondering if in your courses you kind of help with the different uh case studies with it yeah it's it's kind of hard to to take um different data sets and show distance right obviously the capabilities are there but at the same time we need to have uh some dummy data and oftentimes if there's

an ahrefs account or there is a uh there's a Google ads account and so on I would need to show them this data and then I kind of try to stay away a little bit from trying to show very specific cases to uh trying to be more General and that you are able to do these things this it's these are the tools that you can use and it's up to your creativity to now take this and and blend this all together so no uh real cases

on our side in order to to blend data together and it also really depends on your business again um because smaller companies yes you might use the data blending features within Google data Studio bigger companies especially with bigger data probably will have something like a data warehouse where they are bring all the raw data into a a structure called the data warehouse and from there they may be visualize it and use Google lookup Studio as a visualization layer rather than the manipulation of data and the

the the the um the hosting of data you would probably do this in a data warehouse if you are a corporate I would I would say a little bit bigger company yeah makes sense all right I got a maybe a challenging question they like I'm in affiliate marketing especially what we do in the SAS world and I think I've read that affiliate marketing space is worth around 20 billion per year and growing at a rate of 10 to 12 to 15 per year which is pretty

impressive growth in the spaces that I've worked in e-commerce is Advanced and parts of affiliate marketing are and you get to see the space where not only do you help people with with the data but you're obviously seeing a trend in people showing more interest in your courses so if if the data says that maybe the affiliate marketing is going to grow by 10 per year do you think this actually could be a lot higher based on what you see and what you know where maybe

data and business intelligence tools and maybe even AI is possibly going to accelerate this accelerate this accelerate this yeah that to fall to the question I think um technology wise we are kind of at a point where we we yeah I thought wrote here um on the one hand we have II and AI um can tell us uh hopefully uh pushing data in getting better data out and getting insights getting a lot of um these these things that people are yearning for like conversion data for

example example example um is something that is sometimes harder and harder to come by and I I would say from a technology standpoint if you look at affiliate marketing is very much still based on a model of dropping cookies and then being able to pick them up once the user goes over to the affiliate Side and being able to then um send that data back to the to the affiliate themselves and knowing that they have made a sale and you might have heard and yeah uh

two years ago Google has announced that they will kind of phase out cookies from their browser Google Chrome and they're gonna come up with something new now I haven't seen any compelling case yet that this new technology will kind of work like Google analytics or work like cookies it's more based on certain cohorts and so on so right now I'm not convinced that there's a really good targeting methods for everybody who's doing PPC but also for the Affiliates it's not going to be so easy to

just replace cookies and everybody just put in this new code because frankly we need to have a new kind of Technology mechanism in order to order to um to transfer these cookies and these these this information over to the affiliate and be able to visualize it then in our bi tools right so generally I have seen a trend um generally inside of of web analytics that with cookie banners here in Europe uh with with tracking preventions being built into browsers that it's getting harder and harder

to obtain that data of a more accurate data of getting uh to to the conversion data and knowing how much you have ever actually sold and as we know if we don't get that accurate data that spend might go down because you are looking at your data and you're saying hey this doesn't work anymore let's not spend so much money on it right um obviously this will happen for all of the marketing firms so maybe your spend will stay as high up and you will still

um spend that money uh just the trend is still your friend in in a case in that case case case um but generally yeah it's it's a challenging and tough uh thing that I'm seeing right now on the technology side but here comes AI right you push data in and maybe even though there was no hard tracking data tracking data um this will still be able to assign the information to that user to that affiliate and will still give us the right data here so um

we'll see how how fast AI develops and how good the um the algorithms behind it will be the interesting part will then be not only um do I have the right tracking technology installed can I grow with this one and and will the industry develop develop develop um but but rather like who do we now trust in terms of tools out there um is this tool right with their AI or algorithm or is this too right for their AI uh thing that I have going on

this will be interesting to watch so it can go either way um right now I think the the data field is a little bit challenging um just in terms of getting data in um at the same time it's just accelerating because we see these these large language models and um the explosion of AI will definitely change the whole field so to summarize that this is the right space at the right time and Julian is your friend you definitely want to follow him follow him follow him

that would be great uh next question I did a bit of research like I'm really into what you've got for measure school and I found measure Summit and I found that there was one last year and my question is uh what kind of insights did you have I mean you had a lot of amazing guests on that and looked like you have another measure Summit coming up as well yeah absolutely now we need to kind of uh take a step back these always happened on October

and uh we're coming up on on the fourth iteration of this online conference so it's completely free you can sign up and and see all the speakers live so I invite you to that um now last year this happened in October if you remember back in November I think November was the early days of chatgpt so we didn't really talk about AI yet and that it would be the Revolutionary thing obviously we as data people are the most predestined to be kind of kind of kind

of um taken advantage of they already have that data set in front of them they just need to push it into their model and we have seen a lot of developments in terms of machine learning and so on instead of Google ads um but not yet so much inside of ga4 so last year the big big thing was still the whole the whole the whole um a big Trend around ga4 because ga4 was recently switched first of July Universal analytics was turned off and we are

now needing to install or uh have running ga4 to get our insights that's the only free tool analytics free tool that you can get from Google these days and um so a big Trend was around this tool obviously there was a lot of hype around it at the same time a lot of confusion and a lot of um people still thinking oh it will get better within the next half year I would say there have been some improvements it was still a stressful time just the

past few months in terms of uh telling people that it it won't be that bad and um yeah apart from that I think um two main topics ga4 and the other one was privacy so every marketer kind of needs to get used to the thought that privacy is a thing now and not everybody wants to be marketed to and we need to respect people's consent and that's uh what we also from a data perspective as data people need to get used to that we are seeing

a trend of declining um data from the tracking tools that we have now available so that's kind of the the things I predict for this year's uh measure Summit measure Summit measure Summit um AI obviously still a bit of ga4 and um privacy is is obviously yes it is it is still a big topic but people are still now trying to go back to the basics and figure out how can I use um data for affiliate marketing how can I use it for SEO how can

I use it for PPC there are super many different use cases around data and um that's why I think it's a great place to to come and see the speakers and see what what new trends are out there awesome I've already signed up so I'm looking forward to this one for sure awesome and the last question is what do you see the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence yeah yeah yeah um the future of of of affiliate marketing marketing marketing um will

be interesting from a marketing standpoint of maybe there will be different forms of affiliate marketing I mean we already see influencer marketing kind of as affiliate marketing as well um so there are different forms that will come up with different social media platforms that will rise um we'll see how that also plays out in terms of AI if if Google is being replaced uh by by a chat interface as well um and uh so that might impact this whole thing in terms of business intelligence intelligence

um itself I think that um as I said at the beginning or in the middle here I think that there is a technology technology um roadblock ahead with this whole cookie Fiasco that's going on I hope that Google will solve it and appease everybody here but uh yeah uh right now I don't see um that big of a of a shift um right now um and and therefore we all will need to get used to maybe changing data not having the data um not being able

to get very clear signs on like how many people actually converted and I hope that affiliate programs uh can still satisfy their their Affiliates and their customers obviously and make this a very profitable channel for everyone um um um in terms of business intelligence it's going to be a challenge to really attribute all of these sales to the right Affiliates and and where they came from and having the right technology in place in order for the space to to still go to the next height thank

you so much for doing this I'm Gonna Last uh pass it off back to you to say how can people get a hold of you and obviously that goes without saying uh to talk about measure school yeah um sure uh so we are pretty big on YouTube you can check us out at measure school there we have a website measureschool.com where we offer our membership courses around tracking and data and we also offer services there so if you want to get this set up and not

wanting to go through the learning experience we are there for you there as well and if you just want to stay up to a date with all the latest trends check out measuresummit.com where we have um our conference coming up on I think it's a 10th of October right awesome thank you so much for doing this thank you John thank you listeners I'd like to ask for a favor which is if you can leave a five-star rating and a review wherever you listen to this podcast

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