Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics are two different tools used to measure website traffic. While they both have their benefits, they each have their own functionality. In order to decide which tool is best for your website, you need to understand the differences between them. This guide will help you determine when to use which tool for your marketing strategy!

In this side-by-side comparison article, we’ll cover: What is Google Analytics? What is Google Tag Manager? Why do marketers often confuse them with each other in the first place? And what are their key differences?

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a tool that measures website traffic and provides detailed reports about where this traffic is coming from. It also includes features such as conversion tracking, which can be very beneficial for understanding how well your website is performing.

Once everything has been set up with this amazing (and free!) service, marketers are able to view all their activity in one place at once instead of scattered across numerous sources. This enables businesses to save time by getting accurate insights into how customers interact with brands via social media channels without having an employee monitoring them every minute during work hours.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a tool that allows you to manage all of your website tags (for example, Google Analytics, Adwords Conversion Tracking, and more)  in one place. With Google Tag Manager, you get one central JavaScript snippet that replaces each of your old snippets. This single script is easy to install on all pages and can be used for web analytics as well as other services such as tracking conversions or customer engagement. 

This can be very beneficial because it allows you to make changes to your tags without having to edit your website code. It also makes it easier to collaborate with other people who are working on your website, as you can all make changes in the same place. 

After installing the tool with just a few clicks in its interface, Google gives access not only to where these tags should go but also to how often they need to be updated based on their frequency (every hour). This allows marketers to use their data without having to rely on their IT team or web development team because it uses a simple interface that anyone can use.

Why do marketers confuse Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager with each other in the first place? 

Over the years, there has been much confusion about the difference between Google Tag Manager and Analytics.

It's difficult to pinpoint where this misunderstanding comes from because both products are free of charge! And they have many similarities: 

1) They're both developed by Google; 

2) You can use either one in your business without paying anything extra- 

3) Many marketers install GA through GTM but you also have options if that doesn't work out for whatever reason 

The implementation itself may lead many people down an incorrect path, though, as GTM offers more features than just tracking data. Google Analytics is a tracking tool and Google Tag Manager mediator for your website. Both tools serve different purposes, and therefore can not be used as a replacement for one another.

What are the key differences between Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager?

As mentioned, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics are two different tools that have their own purposes. They are not meant to replace each other, but to be used together in order to get the most out of your web analytics. Let us now walk through some key differences between these two tools.

1. Google Analytics report on website traffic data includes data such as the number of people who visited your website in the past 7 days or how many leads your website generated from a marketing channel like Facebook. On the other hand, Google Tag Manager can not report on such website traffic data.

2. Google Tag Manager is a tool that helps you send data from one data source to another. However, it is not a data source itself-it does not store any data. Meanwhile, Google Analytics is a data source that collects various types of information about website users, campaigns, devices, etc. via dimensions and metrics. It then stores this data on its servers, making it available to you for reporting purposes.

3. Google Tag Manager is a tag management tool that is used to add, edit, enable, disable, or remove one or more tags from a website or mobile app. In contrast, Google Analytics is a tag and not a tag management tool. As a result, it cannot be used to control certain actions with tags from a website or mobile app.

4. Google Tag Manager is a container tag, whereas Google Analytics is not. A container tag is used to hold one or more marketing and analytics tags and their corresponding triggers and variables. It can be used to deploy Google Analytics or Facebook pixel tracking on a website. 

Google Analytics collects data from websites while also analyzing it for you in an easy-to-understand, graphically pleasing format that helps to make decisions about future marketing strategies or changes based on where people are clicking more than ever before! 

But if you want to use more complicated tracking events or have multiple tools on your site, it would be best to install Google Tag Manager from the get-go. Not only does this allow for advanced options and flexible connections with Analytics, but it also organizes tags in one place, making it easy for any administrator (or person) to manage the content of pages within that website space!

Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that allows you to manage website tags, and Google Analytics is a tool used to store, process, or report on website traffic data.

So, which tool is best for you? It really depends on your needs. If you need a tool for managing all your tags, then Google Tag Manager might be the better option. However, if you need a tool that provides detailed reports and includes features such as conversion tracking, then Google Analytics might be the better option. Hopefully, these insights will help make more sense when making decisions about which solution would be best suited just for your business needs.