Creating Advanced Facebook Custom Audiences Using Google Tag Manager

Are you looking for advanced ways to build Facebook audiences for retargeting?

Do you know you can combine Google Tag Manager with Facebook Pixel Events?

To explore the value of using these tools together, I interview Chris Mercer.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Chris Mercer, an analytics expert who specializes in helping marketers measure and optimize their marketing. His course is called Master the Fundamentals of Google Tag Manager. You can find him at MeasurementMarketing.io.

Chris explores how to use Google Tag Manager to take your Facebook retargeting to the next level.

You'll discover how to create and use Facebook Pixel Events in your Facebook marketing.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Pixel Events and Google Tag Manager
Chris's Story

Chris, who has a background in sales and marketing, left corporate America to investigate online business. Five or six years ago, he started a site called WP Training Videos. The site was designed to help people understand and learn WordPress, but after customers requested help with building websites, the company's business model changed.

To learn about analytics, Chris installed Google Analytics and set up tracking on opt-in and lead generation forms. When he showed his analytics to a client, the client stopped asking about changing the website design and wanted to learn more about tracking results. Chris soon had more clients who were interested in analytics, and about four or five years ago, the business pivoted again.

Chris's business became Measurement Marketing, which is dedicated to making Google Analytics more accessible to the masses. His clients were often people who installed Google Analytics but didn't know how to use it. Today, Chris works with marketers, marketing teams, and agencies. He shows them what's important to measure, helps them build measurement machines, and shares what to do with the data they collect.

Listen to the show to discover one of the biggest struggles for marketers.

What Is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a tool that was designed to solve an enterprise-level problem. The problem arose about 10 years ago when this new upstart, Facebook, started putting out pixels (snippets of code to copy and paste on a site) that enabled marketers to track things online. It was revolutionary at the time.

After the Facebook pixel arrived, large businesses had to figure out how to bridge the gap between marketing and IT.

To add the code to web pages, marketing had to submit IT help desk tickets, because IT developers were the only people allowed to mess with the website. As a result, IT departments developed bottlenecks and couldn't focus on the right projects, and marketing teams couldn't get the pixels on the pages fast enough. By the time IT added a pixel to a page, the campaign that marketing wanted to measure had been over for eight weeks.

Tag Manager was created to solve that problem.

Marketing teams can use it to put out individual snippets of tracking code (for instance, a Facebook remarketing or conversion pixel) that they can use at any point without having to involve developers. Tag Manager gives marketers granular control over their measurement and tracking.

I ask about the difference between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, and Chris explains Google Analytics does three main things. It collects its data, stores the data, and builds reports based on the data. Google Tag Manager replaces Google Analytics' ability to collect its own data.

Tag Manager collects the data and sends it to Google Analytics so it can stor...