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GA4 & GTM Support in 3rd Party Martech

Blog post illustration of a monitor, coffee cup and plant.
Blog post illustration of a monitor, coffee cup and plant.

GA4 & GTM Support in 3rd Party Martech

Martech vendors: you’ve let your clients down, but most of all you’ve let yourselves down. I’m not angry, just disappointed. I know you can do better than this! 

I’m talking about support for Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics (GA4), of course.

Martech vendors could, and should, do a better job of supporting GTM and GA4 integration in their products. And there’s less excuse than ever, because the vendors have all had to rework their integrations in the last year or so to support the migration from Universal Analytics to GA4. 

I work with a lot of different marketing technology products and I’m often helping clients integrate them with their analytics and tracking systems. I’m increasingly frustrated at how few of these products offer proper support for GA4 and GTM. Or rather – at how often they almost do the right thing, but let themselves down in some way. 

If the martech vendors got their act together, it would be easier and cheaper to integrate the analytics stack with their tools, and clients and agencies could spend more time extracting value from their martech stack and less time building and maintaining integrations. And honestly, it’s not that hard to do it right! Let me explain. 

I’m talking about the sort of martech that provides a component of digital user experience that we might reasonably want to track with digital analytics. So for instance an e-commerce shopping platform like Shopify or Magento; an online booking engine like Bookeo or Arlo; a specialist content management system like Unbounce; or a live chat system like Zoho. In all these cases the martech platform looks after some interesting user interactions, and we want to record these user interactions in a suitable way in the analytics platform.

Because the martech platform is usually a bit of a black box, we need it to provide some way to communicate its internal view of user actions to the analytics system. For example in a live chat system, the chat technology should send events like “user requested a chat” and “user contact details were captured”. In my view there are two different use cases here:

1. Suppose I’m a small organization with a limited budget and no in-house capacity for integration work. I want a simple, push-button integration with GA4 that “just works” and that allows me to sensibly report on and analyse the use of the martech component. It should look like this:

GA4 Tracking Simple Demonstration

There might be one or two choices to make about some of the detail, but basically the tool just needs to know my GA4 tracking ID. Then behind the scenes it can send appropriate events to GA4 using the API.

2. Alternatively, suppose I have the resources and expertise to take a more sophisticated approach to tracking and analytics. In that case I want to use Google Tag Manager, so I can control things for myself. (This might be for some very important reasons – for example perhaps I am handling consent management via GTM.) So then I want this sort of option in my martech tools:

GA4 Tracking Simple Demonstration

And behind the scenes the tool should send appropriate events to GTM using the API. I then add my own triggers and tags in GTM to pass those events on to GA4 and to any other tracking tools.

Now you might think these two use cases look quite similar. And indeed, they are! They require almost identical implementation work within the martech tool. 

So: MARTECH VENDORS SHOULD BE ABLE TO SUPPORT BOTH OF THESE USE CASES. That is: they should provide an option to send events directly to GA4, and a separate option to send events to GTM. (Some people may even want to use both, though that’s a bit of a weird combo.) 

With both options, all users are happy. The small resource-strapped team can get a decent GA4 setup in place with just a few button pushes. The team that can handle more complexity can use GTM to get things exactly the way they want them – including for example GTM-based consent management, data integration via the data layer, or even server-side tagging. And all the complexity about the martech tool itself sits within the vendor’s black box, with no need for complex reverse engineering or “screen scraping”. 

Unfortunately this isn’t happening yet. Martech vendors are picking and choosing their approach to GA4 and GTM. Here are a couple of examples I’ve worked with recently:

Arlo: Arlo is a specialist booking platform. They used to have a built-in Universal Analytics implementation with no GTM support. With the move to GA4 they have released an excellent GTM integration. But they now have no built-in GA4 integration at all! So to use Arlo with GA4 requires use of GTM – great if you already have it, but bad news if you just want a simple GA4 setup.

Shopify: this one is particularly disappointing. Shopify support both GA4 and GTM. But here’s what they say in their GTM documentation:

To use Google Tag Manager with your Shopify Plus online store, you need to do the following:

Use Shopify’s integration for Google Analytics and Meta Pixel instead of using them with Google Tag Manager.  

So you can use GTM with Shopify, but if you do, you must not deploy your GA4 tag via GTM. That’s against the whole philosophy of GTM! And makes it impossible, for example, to use GTM to manage consent.

Unbounce: we work with Unbounce a lot for standalone landing pages, and it’s a great tool. But again it fumbles GA4/GTM support. There’s good built-in GA4 support that sends sensible conversion events. But if you want to use GTM, you have to reverse engineer the triggers to figure out all the user actions. 

I’m sure that there are vendors who’ve done the right thing and provide both GA4 and GTM options. But I’m yet to find one! If you know of any, please chip in on the comments and I’ll gladly give credit where it’s due. 

Let’s put some pressure on our vendors to get this right. If you’re working with martech tools that don’t have proper GA4 and GTM support, get in touch with the vendor and send them a feature request. (You’re welcome to include a link to this blog!)

Unicorns, Donkeys and Visual Agility for B2B Marketing

Unicorns, Donkeys and Visual Agility for B2B Marketing
Unicorns, Donkeys and Visual Agility for B2B Marketing

Unicorns, Donkeys and Visual Agility for B2B Marketing

How our house illustration style enabled us to seize a promotional opportunity at short notice

The Sharp Ahead team turned around a great thought leadership piece for our own marketing last week, producing a really impactful and novel presentation within a 48 hour turnaround time. You can see the end result here. It’s a good case study in B2B marketing agility so I wanted to share the story of how we made it happen.

Why we love illustrations for B2B marketing  

Illustrations are great for B2B marketing when other forms of visual messaging can’t do the job. They allow complex and abstract ideas to be expressed visually in ways that photography often can’t address. At Sharp Ahead we’ve long been advocates of developing a house illustration style and an associated branded illustration library. You can see many examples of the “illos” that we use in our own marketing around this website. And we’ve developed similar approaches for several clients. These illustration libraries become reusable assets that can be applied over and over again in campaign execution.

A B2B marketing challenge with a tight timescale

One of the key benefits of an illustration library is agility, the ability to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Our recent thought leadership piece is a great example of this. Let me take you through the timeline.  The opportunity: my friend Phil Pearce (who runs specialist digital analytics agency MeasureMindsasked me to speak at an online conference, GA4Ward. Another speaker had dropped out at short notice. This was a great opportunity to promote Sharp Ahead’s thought leadership to a large audience, but I had only 2 days to prepare my presentation.  The challenge: I had a rough idea what I wanted to say at the conference, but the only relevant slide deck I had was 7 years old (!) and didn’t reflect our current branding and positioning. Plus I needed to add some completely new material. We didn’t have much time available but I wanted the end result to look professional and on-brand, as well as providing interesting and entertaining content for the conference attendees. So we needed to be very agile! 

Illustrations enhance agility

We’d already invested some time in building up an illustration library, so we had a great start. I was able to put the main framework of my slide deck together using ready-to-go illustrations. This gave me about 80% of the material I needed. But there were still some key bits missing: 
  • I needed some graphics to show the difference between high quality and low quality B2B leads 
  • I needed a slide to illustrate the chaotic and confusing nature of the B2B sales process 
We didn’t have anything suitable for those in our existing illustration library. But we do have the luxury of an in-house illustrator! So I was able to brief our illustrator to quickly create the new illustrations we needed and get those turned around within a couple of hours.  The first missing part needed a bit of thought. We had a brainstorm as a team and settled on the idea of “unicorns” to represent the high-quality leads and “donkeys” to represent the lower-quality leads.  Some quick work from our illustrator gave me some new graphical elements from which I was able to quickly build up the diagrams I needed in my slides. Here’s an example (showing a campaign with an 20:80 split of good:bad leads): 
Unicorns Illustration

I love how the unicorns and donkeys look kinda similar at first glance – which reflects the truth of B2B lead generation in that good leads and bad are often mixed up in a single “conversions” metric.

Finally our illustrator was able to address the second missing part with another custom illustration to show the chaotic nature of the B2B sales process (with guest appearances from our new friends the unicorn and the donkey!):

Diagram

The end result: a great thought leadership presentation, built from scratch in just over a day, with some wonderful visual metaphors that we’ll be using again and again.

Like what you see?

I hope I’ve convinced you that a branded illustration library is a great asset for B2B marketing.

We help clients develop illustration libraries and we can provide on-demand illustrator support for the occasions – like the one I’ve described above – when you need to expand the library at short notice for a special project. 

If you’d like to use illustrations to power up your own B2B marketing, we’d love to help – please get in touch!

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