Tags are segments of code provided by analytics, marketing, and support vendors to help you integrate their products into your websites or mobile apps. With Google Tag Manager, you no longer need to add these tags directly to your projects. Instead, you configure and publish tags and how they fire from within the Tag Manager user interface.
Tag Manager natively supports many Google and 3rd party tag configurations. Custom tags may be used to implement tags that are not yet supported by Tag Manager's native templates.
Tags in the digital marketing and analytics context are similar to, but distinct from, the standard HTML tags that developers will use to code web pages. The analytics version of the word "tag" is derived from the fact that the tags provided by vendors are often encapsulated by HTML <script> or <img> tags.
When we speak of tags in an HTML context, we refer to tags such as <body>, <p>, <li>, <blockquote>, and so on. When we refer to tags used in the analytics and marketing industry, we refer to code that an organization provides to install the desired product or functionality on your website or mobile app.