How to Onboard a New Marketer Using Google Tag Manager Instead of Plugins

When a new marketer joins, they rarely struggle with ideas or campaigns. They struggle with tracking.

Part of the tracking lives in a theme, some in a “universal” script plugin, GA4 was added by a freelancer years ago, and various pixels appeared over time with no clear owner. For a new hire, this is hard to understand and even harder to change safely.

A cleaner option is to make Google Tag Manager (GTM) the main place where tracking lives. Before you involve a new marketer in analytics work, it’s worth giving them a predictable starting point: a clean account and container. A resource like this practical GTM setup tutorial can help you get that baseline in place without turning onboarding into a coding exercise.

Once GTM is installed and working, you can onboard new people around one clear tool instead of a patchwork of plugins.

Why plugin-based tracking slows down onboarding

Using only plugins for tracking looks simple on day one and confusing on day 500. For a new marketer, it usually means:

No single source of truth: Tags are spread across theme settings, multiple plugins, and custom snippets. It’s unclear where a specific tag actually comes from.
Risk of double tracking: The same platform can be installed through a plugin, hard-coded, and added again somewhere else. This leads to inflated data and long debugging sessions.
Heavy access requirements: To change tracking, a marketer may need full CMS admin or even server access. That’s more privilege than they really need and raises security concerns.
Fear of breaking the site: Updating or removing a plugin can affect layouts, performance, or other features. As a result, seemingly simple tracking changes are often postponed.

All of this makes onboarding longer and pushes conversations away from “what should we measure?” toward “where is this thing configured?”.

How GTM makes onboarding more manageable

A GTM-centric setup introduces a different pattern: tags, triggers and variables inside one container, managed from a separate interface. For onboarding, that means:

Everything visible in one place – the marketer can open the container and see what tags exist and when they fire.
Changes are isolated – workspaces and versions make it clear what changed and when.
Testing is built-in – Preview mode lets them validate changes without touching production immediately.
Access is scoped – they can work inside GTM without editing templates, plugins or server files.

Instead of guessing how tracking is stitched together, the new hire learns to read and adjust a clear tagging model.

For additional background and terminology, it’s useful to point them to the official Google Tag Manager introduction so your internal onboarding is aligned with how Google describes the tool.

What a new marketer actually needs to understand

You don’t have to turn onboarding into a long course. In most teams, it’s enough if the marketer can:

Explain which analytics and ad platforms receive data and which GTM tags send it.
See which events matter for your business (sign-ups, leads, key page views) and where they’re tracked in the container.
Understand basic GTM objects:
- tags (what fires),
- triggers (when it fires),
- variables (what data is passed).
Use Preview mode to confirm that a change behaves as expected before it goes live.
Follow simple internal rules for naming tags and documenting changes.

With that level of understanding, they can already support campaigns, coordinate with developers and spot obvious tracking issues.

Moving toward a GTM-centric approach

Onboarding a marketer into a plugin-heavy stack often means asking them to maintain historical shortcuts and fragmented setups. When GTM acts as the central tracking layer, the picture is different: they learn a single, widely used tool and a clear structure.

If you provide: