No Code Required: Auto-Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager

We’re excited to announce that Google Tag Manager has publicly launched Auto-Event Tracking, which lets you measure events happening on the page without writing HTML or Javascript. Those of you measuring events in Tag Manager today will already have minds racing with the possibilities - skip ahead to the screenshot. Everyone else, read on.


As sites become more dynamic and want to understand users’ site experiences in more detail, business owners need to know more: how long are visitors staying on a particular page? How are they interacting with interactive elements like image carousels? How many are clicking the Contact Me button? How many are clicking outbound links? Increasingly, site analytics are incomplete without answers to questions like these.

Unfortunately, until now, answering these questions required adding custom Javascript code to your website to tell Google Analytics when the event occurred. Google Tag Manager users also needed to modify the HTML of each page where they wanted to track an event. That means every time you want to track something new, or change the way you track something, you need to modify site code directly (or, in some cases, ask another colleague to do it for you.) And slower deployment of measurement campaigns directly impacts your ROI.

With Google Tag Manager’s launch of Auto-Event Tracking, we’re excited to announce a solution that provides the power of event tracking without needing to write code. By using the new Event Listener tag, you can tell Tag Manager when you want to listen for events, and then write detailed rules for what to do when an event happens. See an example of listening for form submits here:


Once you have your event listener set up, you can have tags fire based on form submits using a rule that looks for the event gtm.formSubmit. (Of course, Tag Manager supports more than form submits: it also includes clicks and timer events.) You can also make sure you’re getting the right form by using our Auto-Event Variable macros that let you narrow things down with attributes like the element ID and the form target.

The end result: you can deploy event tracking to your site and send event tracking data to Google Analytics without adding any code to your site. You can deploy measurement campaigns faster, and not writing custom code makes your solutions more robust.

Of course, it’s easiest to see the whole picture by walking through a full example. Check out the following resources for more:
We’re looking forward to getting your feedback - let us know what you think!

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Google Tag Manager PM

Introducing an all-new DFA: DoubleClick Campaign Manager

The following post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

The phase of adolescence is a transitional one, and this year, on the 15th anniversary of DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) we find ourselves celebrating a big milestone: an entirely rebuilt campaign management platform for marketers and agencies, the coming of age of DFA. In June, we announced that DoubleClick Campaign Manager would be available to all advertisers in the coming months, and today I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched globally.



DoubleClick Campaign Manager is at the core of our DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. It re-imagines how marketers and agencies manage the entire scope of their digital marketing efforts - from planning and executing, to measuring and optimizing their campaigns.

Intuitive workflows that give you back time. With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we started by building new, time-saving features into a noticeably more beautiful and responsive user interface. This means the time gained from speeding things up can free up opportunities for you and your team to work on higher-value activities.

A new trafficking interface loads up to 5 times faster than before, and ads and ad changes now go live in just 2 minutes. You can also view campaign information centrally from a single page, rather than flipping across tabs. With in-line and bulk editing, we’ve greatly reduced the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks.
Easy tagging. Floodlight, DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag is integrated with Google Tag Manager. Now, you can push Floodlight tags directly from DoubleClick Campaign Manager to Google Tag Manager (and your site), reducing the time it takes to implement tags from weeks, to minutes.
Programmatic and reservations in one place. With one unified UI and reporting system across DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, you get access to accurate, de-duplicated conversion data. Creatives and tags are shared, and remarketing lists are synced so you can engage your audience seamlessly across every part of your buy.

Seamless support for mobile/HTML5, video, and rich media formats. DoubleClick Campaign Manager makes it easier to produce, scale, and traffic creative formats - from mobile and video, to rich media and dynamic.

A mobile-first approach. Mobile is built into the fabric of our platform. Support for IAB-compliant HTML5 creatives means a single creative can render on any device and help you take advantage of the engaging, rich-media capabilities of HTML5. We’ve ensured that your tags work everywhere too. There is no longer a separate mobile tag, and mobile targeting and reporting dimensions are automatically available in all served tags.
Powerful video features. An intuitive approach to video trafficking allows you to share and re-use companion ads across videos, and get a detailed performance breakdown. And support for the next wave of video formats - including interactive video and dynamic VPAID - helps you deliver more engaging videos. Additionally, you can now track your YouTube TrueView campaigns alongside all your other placements, allowing for more holistic insights.
Easier Rich Media. Integration with DoubleClick Studio allows you to easily sync creatives into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, saving you time and effort. New preview functionality allows you to test and QA creatives without relying on your creative agency. And you can create ads that are tailored to your audience with dynamic creative that optimizes the best combination of variables to serve the “perfect ad” for every impression.

New audience features help you surface key insights and optimize campaigns for better performance.

Create powerful remarketing lists based on custom Floodlight variables. Your lists are automatically shared with DoubleClick Bid Manager and updated in real-time, helping you establish second contact with your audience quickly.
New audience reporting gives you strategic insights. Audience is now a new dimension in standard reporting, so you can understand the segments with which your message best resonated. If you use DoubleClick Bid Manager, audience composition reporting shows you how your first party lists overlap with your third party lists. We will be bringing this capability to all customers soon.

Enhancements in reporting for better decisions. Reporting has always been the backbone of the DoubleClick platform, with de-duplicated reporting across channels. We built on this foundation last year with Report Builder, Multi-Channel Funnels, and DoubleClick Verification. Now, with DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we bring you even more insightful reporting tools:

Powerful attribution with Multi-Channel Funnels helps you better understand your customers’ journey from initial interaction to final conversion and more accurately credit the channels and touchpoints that contributed to your conversions. With the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can choose from several basic models of assigning credit for impressions and clicks, or you can create your own model in a way that makes the most sense for your business.
Integration of Wildfire’s social technology platform with the DoubleClick attribution suite means you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in driving social conversions. Additionally, social ad impressions and clicks can be tracked directly in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, allowing you to measure your social programs alongside the rest of your efforts.

When DoubleClick for Advertisers was founded in 1998, we invested in the promise that digital can forge connections and bring value to advertisers, publishers and users. Today, as we celebrate its 15th anniversary, we’re excited to be investing in the next wave of digital marketing where we are even more connected than ever before.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Choose AdSense: Make Money from Your Content

Not using AdSense yet?


In the last ten years, AdSense has helped over 2 million partners grow their businesses. Be sure to tune in on Wednesday September 11, at 11:00AM, when we’ll be hosting a special 10th Anniversary Hangout on Air  for prospective publishers. If you haven’t yet signed up for Google AdSense or would like to learn more, you should join us. We’ll demonstrate how AdSense helps you earn money from your website, allowing you focus on creating great content. Learn how AdSense: 
  • Earns you extra revenue 
  • Shows your users relevant and useful ads
  • Lets you control which ads show up on your site
  • Helps you understand what’s working and what’s not with robust reporting tools
Several publishers will also be joining us to share their AdSense experiences. Hear why they chose AdSense and how it’s helped them grow. 

Join this event page to live stream the Hangout on Air on September 11 from 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT.

Posted by Bola Akinsanya - AdSense Strategic Partnerships Team

Creating a Standard Data Layer for the Tag Management Industry

It’s been an exciting few months for Google Tag Manager. As referenced in our previous post this morning, Google Tag Manager is now serving twice the amount of traffic it was in April 2013 and we have been steadily adding features. Recently, at Google I/O, we announced that  Google Tag Manager will also work with mobile applications

This week, a consortium of companies, including IBM, Accenture and more, along with the W3C, announced they are collaborating to create a standard Data Layer.  

The data layer is a core component of Google Tag Manager and a common way for all businesses to implement tag management tools. It’s a standard way to format data within a web page.  Think of the data layer as a central way for analytics and marketing tools to communicate and share data on a web page. 


It's typically used in two ways: 1. to store data and provide a clear separation between the data and presentation layer of the page and 2. to store data when some type of user activity occurs.  The information in the data layer can then be consumed by different web technologies, like analytics tools or marketing tools, through a tag management platform.

Through the W3C community group we’re supporting the effort to standardize the format and syntax of the data layer. This will make it a lot easier for businesses to add data to HTML  and access it with different tools. An industry-wide standard will create a common way that websites and tag management tools can interact - thus making it easier on site owners.

Standards can not exist in a vacuum. They need adoption. Please take some time to learn about this effort and the specification. You can learn more about the work at the W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Standard Community Group site where you can also review the first draft of the Specification. If you’re interested in participating please join the group and help us test and refine the spec.

Posted by Brian Kuhn, Lukas Bergstrom & Justin Cutroni, Google Tag Manager Team

Solving Tag Management Problems for Large Advertisers

Last year we launched Google Tag Manager to make it easier for marketers to use tools like analytics, conversion tracking and Remarketing without having to edit website code. Google Tag Manager lets marketers place a single tag (a tiny piece of javascript code) on their site, and then with our easy-to-use UI, they can add or update other measurement and marketing tags without bugging the IT folks.

We’ve been thrilled by the response. Google Tag Manager is now serving twice the amount of traffic it was in April 2013, as a significant number of large advertisers with complex tagging needs have signed on.

I’d like to share a few recent Google Tag Manager success stories with you. They range across industries, but all of the customers profiled had a few things in common:
  • They needed to deploy a large number of marketing tags to enable their advertising campaigns, often with complex logic around what data to include from the page, and which tags to fire when.
  • Marketers were dependent on IT to deploy these tags.
  • Limited IT resources meant slow turnaround time, lost insights, and lost revenue.
Smarter Travel Media (an online travel portfolio company), retailer Dafiti, and trip planning company Rail Europe all implemented Google Tag Manager to put marketers back in charge of deploying their campaigns. I’ll let them speak to the results:

“With Google Tag Manager, we can literally deploy a tag in minutes and provide marketing partners with all the custom data they might need. Now, we’re better equipped to optimize our digital campaigns than ever.”

-- Lothaire Ruellan, Director of Online Marketing, Rail Europe

“Google Tag Manager has been very useful so far, cutting our time-to-market on launching new campaigns and media partners, and reducing overhead on IT.” 

- Anderson Kenji Mise, Marketing Intelligence Manager, Dafiti

 “With the Google Tag Manager solution in place, we can deploy tags much faster and with far fewer resources. Therefore, the revenue justification can be smaller and we’re able to test new channels more frequently and with greater speed.

-- Brett Malone, Senior Manager of Search, Smarter Travel Media

Read the full case studies here:

Get started with Google Tag Manager now at the GTM site, watch our introductory webinar for an overview or view our technical implementation webinar to answer your in-depth questions.

Update: have Google Tag Manager questions? We'll be answering them in this thread on Google+.

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Introducing the Google Databoard: A new way to explore research

The following was originally posted to the Inside AdWords blog.

It’s important for businesses to stay up to date about the most recent research and insights related to their industry. Unfortunately -- with so many new studies and with data being updated so often -- it can difficult to keep up. To make life a bit easier, we created the Databoard for Research Insights, which allows people to explore and interact with some of Google’s recent research in a unique and immersive way. 



The Databoard is our response to three big challenges facing the vast majority of research released today. 

1. Ease of consumption: The databoard introduces a new way of sharing data, with all of the information presented in a simple and beautiful way. Users can explore an entire study or jump straight to the topics or datapoints that they care about. The Databoard is also optimized for all devices so you can comfortably explore the research on your computer, tablet, or smartphone. 

2.  Shareability: Most people, when they find a compelling piece of data, want to share it! Whether its with a colleague, client, or a community on a blog or social network, compelling insights and data are meant to be shared. The databoard is designed for shareability, allowing users to share individual charts and insights or collections of data with anyone through email or social networks. 

3. A cohesive story: Most research studies set out to answer a specific question, like how people use their smartphones in store, or how a specific type of consumer shops. This means that businesses need to look across multiple pieces of research to craft a comprehensive business or marketing strategy. To address this need, the Databoard allows users to curate a customized infographic out of the charts or data points you find important across multiple Google research studies. Creating an infographic is quick and easy, and you can share the finished product with your friends or colleagues. 

The databoard is currently home to four research studies including The New Multi-screen World, Mobile In-store shopper research, Mobile search moments, and more. New studies will be added frequently so be sure to check back often. To get started exploring the Databoard and creating your own infographic visit google.com/think/databoard

Posted by Adam Grunewald, Mobile Marketing Manager

Website Satisfaction By Google Consumer Surveys -- For Free

If you are like most business owners, you know how important a healthy online community is to your business’s success. Traditionally, collecting user feedback has been an expensive and time-consuming process, but now you can hear from your site visitors for free using Google Consumer Surveys.

Website satisfaction surveys allow you to easily create customer satisfaction surveys in order to stay in tune with what your customers think. All you have to do is paste a small snippet of code in the HTML for your website. This will load a discreet satisfaction survey in the lower right hand corner of your website so you can get immediate feedback from your users. 



Users will be asked to complete a four-question satisfaction survey. Surveys will run until they have received 500 responses and will start again after 30 days so you can track responses over time. This is currently limited to US English visitors on non-mobile devices.



The default questions are free and you can customize questions for just $0.01 per response or $5.00 for 500 responses. By using Google Consumer Surveys to measure website satisfaction you automatically get aggregated and analyzed responses, provided to you through a simple online interface.

Creating a website satisfaction survey is simple. Give it a try now!

Posted by Marisa Currie-Rose, Product Marketing Manager, Google Consumer Surveys

4 Ways To Win In Retail This 4th Of July With DoubleClick Search

The following post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Search blog.

Ah, the 4th of July: a time for day-long picnics at the park, fishing trips by the lake, night skies filled with fireworks -- and of course, shopping. If you’re a search marketer focused on retail, you know that holidays like the upcoming 4th of July can be an enormous opportunity to capture additional traffic from shoppers looking for the best deals online. So while you’re planning your annual hot dog eating contest, we want to help you start a new tradition this year to win in retail, using integrated solutions from DoubleClick Search. Today, we’re offering up a few retail-ready features to make sure you kick off your holiday search campaigns with a bang:


Manage your product inventory, along with your barbecuing.
There’s no need to step away from the grill: with inventory-aware campaigns, create and update your search ads, keywords, and bids automatically, based on your product inventory. And seamless integration with Google Merchant Center means you can leverage your existing feeds, with no extra work, at no extra cost. Set up rules in the UI that let you: 
  • Expand your reach by automatically creating new ad groups, ads, and keywords based on product availability. And with deep coverage across your product catalogues, we’ll generate those highly relevant long-tail keywords that can be a chore to manage manually. In fact, we’ve seen that inventory-managed keywords more than doubled return on ad spend for heavy users(1) (cite: Google Internal Data).
  • Cut out the repetition in managing existing campaigns, by tying the behavior of ads and keywords to your inventory levels. For example, you can pause keywords when a related product is out of stock, and reactivate them when it’s back in stock, or update ad copy to align with promotions and style changes. You can also change landing page URLs when the links in the feed change. 
  • Express rich customization with ad templates that enable granular product-level messaging at scale. We’ve seen that this rich customization delivers higher conversion rates by attracting only the most qualified clicks.


Plan a PLA picnic: you bring the fruit salad, we’ll bring the richer search ads.
With our fully integrated solution, DoubleClick Search makes creating and managing Google Shopping Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaigns as easy as apple pie. Incorporate product-rich information and measure, optimize, and report on PLA performance using the same familiar workflow you use with the rest of your ads:
  • Integrate with Google Merchant Center to easily view Merchant Center feeds in the DoubleClick Search UI, and to preview exactly what products fall under a product target.
  • Save time and upload product targets in bulk, using our standard upload sheet workflow to quickly create product targets for your highest revenue-generating products.
  • Analyze PLA campaign success with existing reporting features from Doubleclick Search. For example, track budget and key KPIs for PLA campaigns using our budget pacing reports. And with full PLA integration, your reports reflect the same Floodlight or Google Analytics conversion data you use for the rest of your campaigns, to give you a more accurate view of attribution. 


Light up your most fiery landing pages through A/B testing. Which landing page is worthy of a fireworks show? With DoubleClick Search landing page testing, identify and drive traffic to the highest ROI landing pages; then, calculate the exact impact of your landing page optimizations and update your ads immediately to boost results:
  • Easily split your search ads traffic across multiple landing pages to get just the insights you’re looking for. In addition to evenly splitting traffic across your search ads, you can define custom traffic splits (for example, a 90-10 split). 
  • Analyze and compare through historical reporting from previously completed tests to help you determine the exact impact of your landing page changes.


Host a cross-channel block party, get search and display talking. It’s the perfect opportunity to mingle with the neighbors. With display remarketing from search ads -- a cross-channel feature from the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform -- use paid search clicks from DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads across major ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across the Google Display Network, all with an easy and tagless workflow. With this feature, you can:
  • Take advantage of new opportunities immediately with a turn-key setup on one integrated platform. Set up your remarketing lists in 4 easy steps, and begin remarketing to users to quickly deliver the right message to the right consumer, soon after they’ve left your site. And with instant conversions, immediately report on the impact of your remarketing efforts, and fine-tune your approach to improve performance. 
  • Convert browsers to buyers. Re-engage consumers who visited your website, but left without making a purchase. For example, you can reach consumers who placed a pair of sparklers in their shopping cart, but did not complete the checkout process.
  • Increase loyalty or reinforce brand messages. Re-engage consumers by introducing new product categories from the same brand. For example, show a display ad for Brand X lawn chair to someone who previously purchased Brand X outdoor umbrella after clicking on the brand’s search ads.
  • Up-sell to converted audiences. For example, after a consumer purchases tickets to an amusement park in Anaheim, CA, show him/her display ads for hotel deals in Anaheim.

Don’t miss a beat this year. With solutions from DoubleClick Search, stay connected to in-market audiences with the right message at the right time, and report on it all in real-time to capture even more seasonal opportunities. Now that’s certainly something to celebrate!

Posted by the DoubleClick Team

Webinar Video: Combined Power of AdWords and Analytics

Last Tuesday, Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, shared tips for getting more out of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts by using them together. During the webinar, they showed why it’s important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts (which is now even easier to do) and how to see Google Analytics data in AdWords as well as AdWords data in Google Analytics. They also presented a live demo of the reports and how to use them.

If you missed the webinar, you can check it out here:



Read on below for answers to some of the top questions we received during the webinar:

Why should I link my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts?
Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts is an important practice to ensure the two measurement tools can work together to help you get the most from your advertising. The bottom line is that linking Analytics and AdWords gives you powerful information that can tell you where you should be spending more or less based on real ROI data. When you link accounts, the data can flow both ways - from Google Analytics to AdWords (for example, engagement metrics or remarketing lists), and from AdWords to Google Analytics (for example your AdWords cost data). In particular, you can take advantage of powerful features such as:
We covered this topic in detail during the webinar, so watch the video above to learn more.
    Could you share the list of resources that were provided during the webinar?
    Of course! Here are the links and resources we shared:
    What are the best practices around importing Google Analytics Goals? If i’m using AdWords Conversion Tracking should I also import goals?
    If you’re currently using AdWords Conversion Tracking, there are still benefits to also importing some of your goals from Google Analytics. In particular, some goals (such as engagement goals) can’t be tracked with AdWords Conversion Tracking, so importing these into AdWords can complement your Conversion Tracking data. However, it’s important not to import any goals that you are already tracking through AdWords Conversion Tracking as this can create double-counting and duplication, which would make your conversion data hard to interpret.

    Is it possible to link a My Client Center (MCC) account to Google Analytics?
    At this time it’s not possible to link an MCC to Google Analytics. Each individual AdWords account within an MCC needs to be linked to the appropriate Google Analytics property. Learn more here.

    How do I import Google Analytics engagement metrics into AdWords?
    The process for importing the metrics is straightforward, but it’s important to note that there are a couple of additional steps needed beyond linking the AdWords and Analytics account. The full set of instructions can be found here.

    I have noticed discrepancies between the data in my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, do you know why?
    AdWords and Google Analytics differ in some very important ways regarding how they measure and report on data. It’s important to understand these key differences, which are outlined here. Additionally, there are key differences between AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics, which are covered in detail here.

    Can someone help me get more support with AdWords and Google Analytics?
    Yes, Google partners with a global network of certified partners to help. For AdWords, you can get support directly from Google or you can work with a Google Certified Partner to help with your AdWords management. You can learn more about both of those options here. If you’re looking for help with Google Analytics, you can tap into our global network of Google Analytics Certified Partners, who offer paid services for anything from Google Analytics tag implementation to product training to more strategic support. Learn more here.

    What is a tag?
    Tags are tiny bits of website code that let you measure traffic and visitor behavior, understand the impact of online advertising and social channels, use remarketing and audience-based marketing, test and improve your site, and more. The tags we mentioned in the webinar are AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics. These both help you understand the performance of your digital campaigns. While AdWords tracks the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns, Google Analytics tracks the performance of any traffic to your website -- such as from email marketing campaigns or social media. You can learn more about how they’re different here and through some of the content in the webinar.

    What is a conversion?
    A conversion is an action that a customer takes on your website that has value to your business, such as a purchase, a sign-up, or a view of a key page. These actions are called conversions because a customer's click translated -- or converted -- to business. Think of it as the cha-ching! from your cash register. A conversion happens when someone clicks your ad and then does something that’s valuable to your business, such as an online purchase or a call to your business from a mobile phone. Conversions help you understand how much value your ads bring to your business. You can read more here

    Display Remarketing from Search Ads Out of Beta

    A version of this post originally appeared on the DoubleClick search blog.

    Back in October, we announced the beta release of display remarketing from search ads, which allows advertisers to use insights from paid search clicks to remarket to audiences across ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or the Google Display Network (GDN) -- all with a seamless, tagless workflow. 

    We’re excited to announce that display remarketing from search ads is now out of beta, and is available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally. This brief video provides a visual explanation:


    Already, customers have shown some impressive results. Anton Kanis, Head of Business Solutions, Netherlands for OmnicomMediaGroup, has been using the feature to remarket via DoubleClick Bid Manager. Kanis notes “Display remarketing from search ads is proving itself to be a very valuable feature, often outperforming regular funnel remarketing and sometimes even search in terms of CPA.”

    If you’re interested in trying display remarketing from search ads to take advantage of more cross-channel opportunities, reach out to your DoubleClick representative, visit the DoubleClick site, or contact the DoubleClick Search support team at ds-support@google.com.

    Posted by the DoubleClick Team