Using Google Tag Manager in online learning

How to use Google Tag Manager to get more powerful insights from your LMS.

Google Analytics is a useful tool to get more data on how people are using your LMS. When it is combined with Google Tag Manager, those insights become even more detailed and even more powerful.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is Google’s tag management system. It allows you to quickly and easily create small snippets of code — tags — that can be incorporated into a website or app to measure very specific actions and events. It can also be added to an LMS to deliver the same results.

How does Google Tag Manager work with an LMS?

Once you’ve added Google Analytics to your LMS to manage the overall flow of data between the two platforms, you can get started.

Using the tag manager interface, you can create new tags and set triggers that activate each tag when specific events happen. You can also create variables to give you greater control over tags and the insights they generate.

The tags, triggers and variables are all managed and edited from within the interface, which communicates directly with the Google Analytics tracking code. That means there is no need to edit code or make changes to your LMS.

How Google Tag Manager improves your LMS analytics

Using Tag Manager makes it easy to create very detailed, very specific insights into almost every aspect of your LMS with very little effort required. Once your tags are created you can measure things like:

• How long did a user spend on a specific course?
• Which activity types create the best engagement among your users?
• How long did the user watch the video for?

Those simple examples alone could help you to create a wide range of useful data. You might be able to see a correlation between the time spent on a course and the pass rate. 

Watching all the video lectures for course X might be an indicator of future success (or failure). You could identify a common drop-off point in video content and edit it to increase engagement.

The possibilities are virtually limitless, so it perhaps makes most sense to reverse engineer. What data will have the most impact on the success of your workplace learning programme and how could this be measured?

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