Last week, I had the privilege of presenting at SMX East in NYC about tracking user engagement with Google Tag Manager. GTM is a powerful tool, and many marketers aren’t using it to its fullest capabilities.

Here are the key points of my session:

You Need to Measure More Than ROI

We tend to focus on measuring the conversions that connect directly to ROI (like lead form submissions and ecommerce purchases), but we also need to pay attention to how we can track the people who don’t buy right away.

How much time did they spend on the site before dropping off? What actions did they complete? How can we segment the people who did spend time reading an article, reaching them with a remarketing ad later?

That’s where Google Tag Manager comes into play to help you track additional actions that Google Analytics doesn’t track by default.

Scroll Tracking

First, scroll tracking allows you to improve engagement reporting in Google Analytics. You’ll see events showing when people scrolled to certain points on the page and also get a more accurate view of metrics like average session duration and bounce rate. You can also build retargeting audiences based on people who scrolled to a certain point on the page.

See a walkthrough of how to set up scroll tracking.

PDF Download Tracking

Since Google Analytics doesn’t track PDF clicks by default, setting up a GTM tag to track these will help give a more complete picture of what content people are downloading on your site.

For instance, you might have an ebook gated behind a form, and you might be tracking how many people fill out the form, but you might not be tracking that final step of actually downloading the ebook. You can then connect the download activity to a conversion with an event-based goal in Google Analytics.

See this article for more details on tracking PDF clicks (and other button clicks).

Embedded Video View Tracking

GTM’s built-in YouTube tracking allows you to measure engagement with any embedded video on your site. You can track when people start watching, when they stop, and when they reach a certain percentage point or time threshold, correlating those engagement points to Google Analytics events.

This tracking is valuable to get extra data on how engaged people are on a landing page, and let you see if it’s worth including a video in the first place. You could also build retargeting audiences based on engaged viewers.

See this article for a walkthrough of setting up video view tracking.

More on Google Tag Manager

If you’re just getting started with Google Tag Manager, or want to learn more in general, check out our BIG List of Google Tag Manager Guides & Resources.