Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics: Differences & Uses

Analyzing your website’s traffic can significantly enhance how you gather insights and optimize your strategies. Two key tools for this are Google Analytics (GA) and Google Tag Manager (GTM). Both are from Google and are often used together, but they serve different purposes.

It’s time to understand the differences between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, and later in this post, we'll explore how Fathom Analytics can be a great choice for those who need straightforward tools that comply with strict privacy laws.

Understanding Google Analytics

First things first - let’s start by understanding what Google Analytics is all about. Google Analytics (including the most recent version, GA4) is a set of analytics tools provided by Google that tracks and analyzes website traffic, offering invaluable insights into visitor behaviour and interactions.

GA4 helps website owners understand how users engage with their site, which strategies drive traffic, and what areas may need improvement.

What Are the Core Functions of Google Analytics?

GA4 is essentially a web analytics tool, which means that users have access to the following main features:

• Traffic Analysis: GA4 can tell you whether your visitors come from search engines, social media, direct links, or referral websites. This information is vital for understanding which marketing efforts are paying off and how users find your website.
• User Behaviour Analysis: By examining data such as page views, session duration, and bounce rates, GA helps you understand how users interact with your site.
• Conversion Tracking: Google Analytics lets you define specific actions as conversions, such as e-commerce purchases, sign-ups, or form submissions. You can set up goals and measure how well your site fulfills these objectives.
• Real-Time Reporting: This feature lets you monitor activity on your site as it happens. Real-time reporting is particularly useful during new campaigns or events, providing immediate feedback on user response and engagement levels.
• Audience Insights: GA offers demographic data, interests, and other information about your audience, helping you better understand who your visitors are.

Understanding Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tag management system that allows you to quickly and easily update tags and code snippets on your website or mobile app.

Tags are small blocks of code that can help gather analytics data and support marketing efforts without the need for hard-coding each change, and GTM is designed to simplify the life of marketers and webmasters by allowing them to manage the deployment of such tags without needing to modify the code each time directly.

What Are the Core Functions of Google Tag Manager?

Among the most relevant features of Google Tag Manager, we have the following:

• Management of Tracking Codes (Tags): GTM lets users add, edit, and disable tags through a user-friendly interface without altering the source code of a site.
• Ease of Deployment for Different Tracking Technologies: Whether you're implementing simple analytics tracking, complex re-marketing services, or testing new tools, GTM streamlines the process. You can test and deploy these technologies at a much quicker rate than if you were to go through traditional code deployments.
• Integration Capabilities with Other Platforms: GTM supports tags from a broad array of platforms beyond Google's own services, including HubSpot and Salesforce. This flexibility makes it an essential tool for comprehensive digital marketing strategies that employ multiple analytics and marketing platforms.

Key Differences Between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics

While both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics are essential tools in digital analytics, they serve different purposes and operate in distinct ways. Let’s quickly understand their differences so we can effectively use them.

Function and Purpose

• Google Analytics' Purpose: Google Analytics is primarily focused on tracking and analyzing website traffic. It collects data about website visitors, their behaviors, and interactions to provide insights into performance and user engagement. Its primary function is to help businesses understand the effectiveness of their website and marketing campaigns in attracting and retaining visitors.
• Google Tag Manager’s Purpose: Google Tag Manager is designed to manage and deploy marketing and analytics tags on a website without having to modify the code directly. It acts as an intermediary that deploys tags based on configured rules and triggers.

User Interface and Usability

• Google Analytics: GA provides a complex but comprehensive dashboard that displays various metrics related to website performance. Users interact with menus to access reports, configure data views, set up goals, and more.
• Google Tag Manager: GTM features an interface centered around the management of tags, triggers, and variables. The primary user interaction involves setting up tags based on specific actions or site interactions and testing these tags.

Privacy and Data Governance

• Google Analytics: GA should comply with data privacy laws and regulations, such as GDPR, as it collects and processes personal data from website visitors. Users must ensure they configure GA to collect data responsibly, including handling cookies and user data according to legal requirements.
• Google Tag Manager: While GTM itself doesn’t collect personal data, it deploys tags that can collect data. So, managing what tags are fired and ensuring they comply with privacy laws is crucial.

Integration and Deployment

• Google Analytics: GA4 can be integrated directly into a website by placing the tracking code in the HTML of each page or through GTM. The direct method is straightforward but less flexible compared to using GTM.
• Google Tag Manager: GTM can deploy not only Google Analytics but also a variety of other analytics and marketing services' tags. It's a versatile tool that simplifies the process of adding, editing, and managing multiple tags without frequent code changes to the website.

How Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics Work Together

When used together, GTM and GA4 can significantly enhance a website's data collection and analytical capabilities. Implementing Google Analytics starts by inserting the GA tracking code into the HTML of every web page you want to track. GTM simplifies this by letting you manage this implementation from a single interface. After the initial GTM snippet is installed on your site, you can deploy and update GA from within GTM without ever touching the website’s code again.

Then, with GTM, you can set up rules that dictate when the GA tracking code should fire. For example, you might set up GA to track page views generally but also deploy specialized tracking, such as events, based on user interactions or behaviours that meet specific criteria.

This integration allows for easier addition and updates of tracking tags, saving time and minimizing errors. Using GTM to manage when and how data is sent to GA helps refine the data collection process, focusing on the most relevant user interactions, which improves the accuracy of the data collected and supports more informed business decisions.

Simpler Alternative: Fathom Analytics

For businesses and website owners who prioritize simplicity and privacy in their web analytics, Fathom Analytics emerges as an attractive alternative to Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager.

Unlike Google Analytics, which employs invasive data collection methods that track detailed user-specific data and can compromise privacy, Fathom opts for a privacy-focused, aggregated approach. Fathom does not use cookies, nor does it track personal information, making it GDPR compliant. This ensures user privacy while simplifying the process of analyzing web traffic by providing all necessary data in a single, easy-to-use dashboard.

Fathom still offers robust features for tracking key website metrics, including event tracking. It allows users to track conversions and user interactions like button clicks and form submissions with minimal setup, which can easily replace GTM if you want to avoid Google’s ecosystem on your website.

Also, if using GTM is unavoidable on your site, Fathom can be set up with GTM by adding the Fathom tracking code into a new custom HTML tag, setting this tag to trigger on all pages, and then publishing the changes.

Summary: Google Analytics vs. Google Tag Manager

As you can see, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are two distinct tools that complement each other well, providing more comprehensive use cases when used together.

However, if you are concerned about privacy issues and complex interfaces, Fathom Analytics provides a straightforward alternative to the likely illegal Google ecosystem. Below is a quick table summarizing the key differences between GTM and GA4: