Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics 4

Last Modified on May 2, 2024

The last decade has seen a lot of exciting changes in measurement and analytics, resulting in the introduction and growth of many tools.

These tools and their ever-changing features and updates can easily confuse many marketers and people who don’t use them daily because it’s hard to keep up with all the changes.

Google Analytics 4, the successor of Universal Analytics (UA), is one of those tools used by small to large enterprises that keeps evolving frequently, which means there’s always more to learn.

GA4 is often used in combination with Google Tag Manager. Along with other tools like Google Search Console, Google Ads, and Google Looker Studio, it can quickly become confusing to differentiate between them.

So, in this blog, we will compare Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics 4 to make it easier for users to understand their purposes and differences through the following topics:

• What is Google Analytics 4?
• What is Google Tag Manager?
• Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics
• When to Use Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics 4?

Let’s dive into it!

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 is the successor of Universal Analytics, Google’s web analytics tool that ran for 12 years and stopped working on 1st July 2023 (July 2024 for 360 customers).

It is a tool that collects data on user behavior and interactions, i.e., actions users take on the website or app, and provides different reports to measure the performance of your website/app as well as marketing data provided the other tools are sending data to GA4.

GA4 is the fourth iteration of this widely-used web analytics tool since it was taken under Google’s wing. GA4 aims to address the ever-evolving digital marketing playground and user privacy concerns.

Here are some essential features that GA4 brings to the table:

• Event-based tracking – It moves away from session-based to focus on event-based tracking as it provides a better overview of user engagement because events are actions users take. This data model has also been used by other analytical tools in the industry for some time now.
  
• Unified web + app data – GA4 collects website and app data in one property so it can provide a better understanding of the whole user journey.
  
• Debugging – GA4’s DebugView makes it easier to debug and troubleshoot the data as you can see the live data coming in with all the details so that you can be confident about your tracking. Compared to UA, where we’d either rely on real-time reports or wait till the data shows up in standard reports, this is quite a step up.
  
• Privacy controls – GA4 improves user privacy out of the box and is continuously working towards making it better. You can now select data retention time and the reporting identity that suits you, delete subsets of data, and the IP is anonymized automatically (which you cannot disable).
  
• Improved integration – Google Ads integrates better with GA4 now, as you can create audiences based on events vs just sessions. GA4 can also be linked to BigQuery, previously only available to paid customers in UA. So, you can now own your data and do advanced analysis out of the GA4 interface.
  
• Cross-domain tracking – With GA4, tracking users across different domains has become much more effortless without dealing with code or logging into your GTM account. All you have to do is add your domains to the tag settings of the data stream.
  
• Enhanced measurement – These are events that can be enabled from GA4’s admin settings and make it easy to track core user interactions, which was not possible with UA.
  
• Explorations – GA4 offers explorations that allow users to build custom reports of different types. These are not available in the standard reports. It enhances the reporting capabilities and offers considerable flexibility as you can create from table reports to funnels and path explorations, to name a few.

These are only some of the main highlights. But there are a lot of other features that have been introduced with GA4, and hopefully, with time, it will keep getting better at addressing any challenges that come in the digital marketing world.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is simply a tag management system (TMS) that helps to add tracking codes of other tools like GA4 and track events without manually messing around with the website’s code.

It also makes it easier to have all the tracking in one place, making tracking implementation easier, as opposed to hard-coding tracking of different events on the website.

Like GA4, GTM is also free too. There are other tag management tools on the market, like Tealium, Adobe Launch, etc., but GTM is one of the most widely used tools.

All the users have to do is install the GTM code on their website and then use GTM to add tracking for analytical tools, ad platforms like Google Ads, Meta, X, Linkedin, etc., remarketing tags, and install any custom codes if needed.

The reason tag management tools are quite popular is because they can help you to rely less on developers, which is especially good for businesses with limited resources, as well as get important tracking in place so you can still run your marketing campaigns.

Ideally, GTM takes information from the data layer to use in the tracking setup and then sends that data to other tools like GA4. So, in essence, it acts like an intermediary.

Other methods, like website scraping, are used when the data layer is unavailable. It is not considered a good practice, as tracking based on scraping can break easily, whereas the data layer is a robust solution.

As the objectives and functionalities of Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics are different, their interface and use cases are also understandably quite different.

Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics

Fundamentally, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are different. Apart from UI differences, other differences are critical to understand as well.

• Data collection – GTM tracks and collects the data but does not store it, whereas GA4 can do all of those. So, GTM acts as a medium to track, collect, and send data to GA4.
  
• Reporting – GA4 has robust reporting capabilities that allow for different kinds of analysis. But you can never do that with GTM, as it doesn’t do any reporting.
  
• Integration – We can only track GA4-specific events with GA4 tracking through GTAG, i.e., hard coding. But with GTM, we can track events for other platforms, as well, and manage them in one place.
  
• Events – When using GA4 to track events, we have to follow a specific code pattern, and these code snippets have to be placed on the website for all the events you want to track, like the one below where button_click is the event with button_text parameter.

gtag('event', 'button_click', {
  button_text: 'Submit'
});

With GTM, you track events by creating GA4 event tags and then setting up conditions (aka triggers) when these events should be collected and sent to GA4.

• Conversions – GTM sends the events to GA4. It doesn’t know if they are conversions as they are configured in GA4’s interface.
  
• Users – The users of both tools could be different. GA4 tends to have a wider audience where marketers, product/project managers, and other stakeholders would like to get important insights. GTM is generally the playground of implementation specialists who like more of the technical side of things vs reporting and analysis.
  
  But data is the limit with both tools, and that isn’t always the case, as many people tend to use them daily even if their purposes are different.

This leads to our next question: which tool should you use?

When to Use Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics 4?

The short answer in most situations is to use them together as they complement each other, and it’s not an either-or situation.

Yes, you can use GA4 without GTM, but with it, implementation and tag management become painless and more organized. Otherwise, you would heavily rely on developers for even minor changes, which creates more delays.

Similarly, GTM can be used independently of GA4, but that rarely happens. Frankly, it doesn’t make much sense to not use GTM to install GA4 on your website/app and send data to GA4, as you can make changes frequently, quickly, and easily.

So, if you hone in on the power of both tools and use them for the purposes they are built, you are going to streamline the whole tracking and reporting process and save a lot of time and money you would spend on back-and-forth communication and getting the developers to add codes manually.

The essential bit is to ensure that you use only one tool for tracking purposes, i.e., installing tracking codes or sending the events to GA4 via GTM.

The same tracking code and events should not be collected via any manual GA4 codes on the website, or you would be double-counting everything and have a lot of messy, unreliable data.

Hopefully, this clarifies any confusion and helps you to make the most out of these powerful tools.

Summary

If you’re new to digital marketing, you can easily get confused between Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics 4, especially due to the new changes in the past couple of years.

We’ve learned about Google Analytics 4 and how it brings new features to the table to improve privacy and address other challenges of the digital marketing realm with its advanced reporting abilities.

We also looked at how Google Tag Manager works to help us track events for GA4, Google Ads, and other marketing platforms while keeping things organized and giving us more control to make quick changes without relying too much on the developers.

The differences between both tools should hopefully clarify any confusion you might have about them, which ranges from their interfaces, objectives, and what you can do with each tool.

Finally, we learned that the best way is to use them together rather than choosing between the two, as it streamlines the tracking and reporting.

If you want to learn more about GA4, our Google Analytics 4 Tutorial for Beginners is a comprehensive guide to get you started!

Were you also confused about GA4 and GTM? How do you use them to get more out of your data? Share it all with us in the comments below!