What is the Difference Between Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager?
They are two completely different things that serve two very different purposes.
Google Tag Manager can be used on your website JavaScript allows you to manage tracking codes (also known as tags). The Google Analytics tracking code is one of these tags.
Google Analytics is an analytics tool that provides reports. Google Tag Manager does not have a reporting feature. Used to send data from your website to other marketing/analysis tools (including GA).
Google Tag Manager is a completely different tool used only to store and manage third-party code. There is no way to generate reports or analyze in GTM.
Google Analytics is used for actual reporting and analysis. All conversion tracking goals or filters are managed through Analytics.
All reporting (conversion reports, custom segments, ecommerce sales, time on page, bounce rate, engagement reports, etc.) is done in Google Analytics.
Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics are not interchangeable. It is intended to be used together.
Google Analytics in a nutshell
The main purpose of Google Analytics is to track and store data and generate reports about your website, for example:
• How many people visited your website yesterday?
• From which country were the visits made?
• How many pages did they visit per session?
• How many visitors returned from your website (without any action)?
• Which were the most popular pages?
The only way Google Analytics can track these user interactions is with the help of the tracking code (also known as the GA JavaScript snippet), which must be placed on every page of your website.
When an interaction occurs on a site (for example, a page view), a JavaScript snippet sends the relevant data to Google Analytics.
If you just want to embed the GA tag on all websites and track general information like page views, bounce rate, session duration, referrals, it's fine.
You may want to monitor how many people are using a particular feature on your website/app. Or maybe you're interested in tracking sales, huh? In this case, you need to add custom tags with Google Analytics events that send data only when a visitor completes a certain action on your website. A good example here would be a form submission.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager makes it easy to manage this tag mess by letting you define rules for when certain tags should fire.
Google Tag Manager does not replace Google Analytics. Instead, it helps users easily add the Google Analytics tracking code (tag) to a website, distribute GA event code snippets, and define rules when each code should be triggered.
Before GTM, GA tracking codes often had to be hard-coded on each page by a web developer. It is very difficult to have hundreds of events when it comes to maintaining/updating them. But Google Tag Manager solves this problem because all your tags are stored in one place, namely in your GTM account.
Google Analytics isn't the only tag compatible with Google Tag Manager. Other examples include:
• Google Ads Conversion Tag
• Google Ads Remarketing Tag
• Facebook Pixel Code
• Crazyegg Tracking Code
• Inspectlet Tracking Code
• Any Other Custom HTML / JavaScript Code
Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics
Having both of these tools can make your life so much simpler. Data can be sent from Google Tag Manager to Google Analytics so you can analyze the data, see trends and find all the information you need in one place. It can be easily set up using a Click Trigger and a Tag from Google Analytics to see what links are downloaded by users or just about anything you want to collect data from. Triggers can also be used to select specific times to send data to Google Analytics so that it can be done automatically. These two tools can be very helpful, but when used together they can be even more helpful.
