Thousands of private practice website owners received one or more emails this week about
Google Tag Manager.
As with other communications from Google in the recent past, these emails caused a lot of confusion. This will hopefully clear up that confusion.
What Were The Emails That Google Sent Out?
The first email had the following subject line:
Upgrade to Google’s latest tagging solution for your site
And the second email implored:
{Your name}, don’t forget to upgrade to the latest tag
The body of both emails was the same:
Do Therapists Need To Do Anything With This?
While these emails resulted in a ton of questions to our support desk, the truth is, 99 percent of therapists can ignore these emails. Most likely, you aren’t using tagging at all, so upgrading to the newest tagging system isn’t necessary!
But, What Is Google Tag Manager, Anyway, And Who Uses It?
Tagging is mainly a way to track user behavior on your website.
If you have Google analytics installed, you’re already able to track how many people come to your site from Google searches, social media, paid ads, or from “direct” traffic (which includes email clicks). You’re also able to see how long they stay on your site, what pages they visit, where they leave from, and more. If you have Google Search Console integrated with Google Analytics, you can also see what specific search terms brought people to your site.
However, if you have a lot of site visitors and want a deeper understanding of how people interact with your site, beyond what Google Analytics reports, you may want to track other actions people take.
Moz.com provides this explanation of tags and their uses:
Tags are snippets of code which are added to a site to collect information and send it to third parties. You can use tags for all sorts of purposes, including scroll tracking, monitoring form submissions, conducting surveys, generating heat maps, remarketing, or tracking how people arrive at your site. They’re also used to monitor specific events like file downloads, clicks on certain links, or items being removed from a shopping cart.
This type of tracking is the playground of marketing geeks, and not that many therapists fall into that camp.
If You Own A Large Group Practice And You Love Data, You May Want To Implement Tagging
We do have some clients, mostly large group practices that have become fairly sophisticated in their marketing. If you fall into this camp, you may want to use tagging on your website to track detailed user behavior.
Tagging can help you:
- Track form fills.
- Track data from installed heat map software so you can see where people spend the most time reading specific text on your site.
- Track how many people download your forms.
But Most Therapists Aren’t Ready For Google Tagging
In my experience, most therapists should first focus on strengthening their websites so that they rank in Google and get a lot more relevant site visitors. Even when that is accomplished, they won’t need to worry about tagging to track site behavior.
