Modern marketing tools, such as web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and advertising services, often depend on adding “tags” to your website. To make the process of maintaining pages that contain tags a little easier, Google has rolled out its new Tag Manager service giving webmasters the ability to consolidate tags in websites with just a few clicks. It is not limited to just Google tags either. Tag Manager lets webmasters add and update their website tags, which are required for analytics, marketing, and advertising services, without having to touch code in their pages each time a change or addition is needed. All code that you add to Tag Manager will automatically be linked up and served to your website.

You get up and running, you simply set up your Tag Manager account, similar to setting up a Google Analytics or AdSense account, and add the Tag Manager code to your website’s pages. Once the account is set up, you can easily add tags, such as Google Analytics code, in Tag Manager and your website will pick up and serve the changes. This ability not only makes website easier to modify, but also is more efficient (and faster) since the website does not have to hit multiple third-party sites to pick up code.

Tag Manager features asynchronous tag loading for faster page load times, a preview mode to view changes before they are pushed to the server, tag templates, a debug console, user permissions and multi-account functionality, and a version history tracker. For Google, it gives them a way to aggregate data from multiple sources, even data from third parties, and use for their own mining purposes.

Google also announced a Tag Vendor Program which enables tag vendors to place templates with Tag Manager. You can check it out here.