Set up Google Tag Manager in 5 minutes

Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool for managing all your tracking tags in one place — whether you're running a basic web setup or a more advanced server-side configuration. If you're wondering how to set up Google Tag Manager, getting started comes down to a few straightforward steps. You can set up Google Tag Manager in 5 minutes for a basic web container:

1. 1.
   Sign in to tagmanager.google.com and create a GTM account and container.
2. 2.
   Accept the data processing terms.
3. 3.
   Add the GTM code snippets to your website's head and body sections.
4. 4.
   Configure your tags, triggers, and variables inside the container.
5. 5.
   Test your setup using GTM Preview and submit the changes.

The full detailed Google Tag Manager setup guide, with step-by-step instructions for both web and server containers, is available further in this article. And if you're looking to speed things up, also check out the Setup Wizard, a free tool developed by Stape that automatically adds pre-built tracking templates to your GTM containers based on the platforms you select.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tag management solution developed by Google that makes it easier to handle tracking codes on your website. It allows you to manage all your tags in one centralized interface – whether you are deploying standard analytics tags, ad pixels, or integrations like the Bing Conversion API. Using GTM eliminates the need for adding code manually to your website's HTML, making it simpler to manage the data tracking process, including knowing how to delete Google tags you no longer need alongside adding new ones.

Below is a walkthrough of how to set up Google Tag Manager for both web and server containers.

1. Go to Google Tag Manager and sign in to your Google account.

2. In the tab Accounts, click Create account.

3. Add a name for the account, choose the country location for it, name the container, and select the target platform (in this case, it is web). Click Create.

4. Accept data processing terms.

5. Install Google Tag Manager on your website according to the given instructions.

Please note: The GTM code snippet must be placed into every page of your website. It can be done manually, but it takes too much time if you have a lot of pages. For this purpose, you can use plugins on the marketplace of the CMS you use or one of Stape's apps. They are primarily aimed at configuring server-side tracking, but with their help, you can also add a GTM snippet automatically:

• WordPress plugin
• Shopify app
• Magento 2 extension
• BigCommerce app
• Wix app
• PrestaShop module
• Salla app

To configure the server GTM container, you will need:

• Configured web GTM container as we showed above;
• Hosting provider for the server GTM container. One of the popular options is hosting directly on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), but it may end up being a more expensive and harder-to-use solution, especially for new users. So, Stape is a more affordable and user-friendly alternative to GCP.

Compared to the web container, server-side Google Tag Manager setup is more complex. It includes the following steps:

1. 1.
   Creating a server GTM container as part of your Google Tag Manager setup.
2. 2.
   Hosting the container on Stape.
3. 3.
   Configuring a custom tagging server URL to set up first-party cookies.
4. 4.
   Creating a Google Tag inside the Web GTM container.
5. 5.
   Configuring the GA4 Client inside the server GTM container to send data from the web to the server GTM container.
6. 6.
   Activating Stape's power-ups, such as Custom Loader and Cookie Keeper, to make tracking codes less affected by ad blockers and browser restrictions.

We have a comprehensive guide on server GTM container configuration. In this article, we will briefly describe the steps. For the detailed instructions, please refer to that guide.

The table below compares the two ways of handling Google Tag Manager setup on a website.