Mobile Apps pose a unique set of challenges for marketers and developers. On the web, you can iterate on content and features in near-real-time and deploy conversion tracking, Remarketing, analytics and other tags to measure the effects on your users. Apps, on the other hand, are effectively frozen at the point of user install. Making even the slightest change means waiting until your next update makes its way through the various app stores and even then, you can’t be sure that all of your users will update quickly, if at all.
The surprisingly static nature of Mobile Apps creates significant problems. Forget to add an event to a key button press? Tough! Need to add conversion tracking for a last minute campaign? Too bad! Realize you need to change an important configuration setting? Sorry, not possible... that is, until now! Previewed at Google I/O earlier this year, today we're launching Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps.
With
Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps, you instrument your app once and from then on, you can change configurations and add analytics, remarketing and conversion tracking later – without updating your app.
Just like on the web, Google Tag Manager continues to be a free product, streamlining the process of adding “tags” to your native iOS and Android apps, making it both easy and accountable. Measuring key events is now as simple as 1-2-3:
- Include the new Google Analytics Services SDK (Android, iOS) in your app. This new unified SDK includes both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics functionality while sharing a common framework.
- Push interesting and important events to the Data Layer. Once events are registered on the data layer, they can be used to trigger Google Tag Manager Tags and Macros.
- Use Google Tag Manager’s web-based interface to write Rules and determine when various Tags should fire.
If you’re already a Google Tag Manager user, then there’s really nothing new for you to learn. The same style Tag Templates, Rules and Macros that you already know are now available for the new Mobile App Container Type. New users can get up to speed quickly, thanks to the easy-to-use web-based interface.
Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps natively supports AdWords Conversion Tracking, AdWords Remarketing and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps (Universal Analytics) tags. It also supports custom and 3rd party tracking events using the custom tag. For Mobile Apps, Google Tag Manager also takes things one step further using the Value Collection Macro. As we previewed at
I/O 2013, developers can now create server-side configurations and use them to build highly configurable Apps. Collectively, these new features make Google Tag Manager a powerful tool for marketers and App Developers alike.
Posted by Russell Ketchum, Product Manager, Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager
