Yes. Obviously. Go learn it, close the tab.
Still here? Good, because the real answer is more interesting than that, and it turns on one thing nobody warns you about: not whether you can learn GTM, but how often you will actually use it once you have.
Here is how I found that out the slow way.
The confession
I got into Google Tag Manager in 2015. I had been doing marketing long enough to be dangerous by then, the kind of person who can run a paid campaign half asleep, and GTM still managed to make me feel like a rookie. Every time it got hairy I tapped a developer on the shoulder and waited. And waited. You know the scene: the campaign is ready, the tracking is not, and the one human who can fix it is buried until Thursday.
So I did the responsible thing and learned it. MeasureSchool got me off the ground, and a little later Analytics Mania carried me the rest of the way. I am not going to gush. I will just say it plainly: I am a senior marketer who picked up a craft from two people who teach it far better than I ever could, and I am not too proud to put their names in writing. Without them I would still be emailing a developer and refreshing my inbox.
Happy ending, then. I learned it, it worked, roll credits.
Except that was not the ending.
The part that actually bites
Here is what kept happening. I would set up tracking for a client, get everything humming, hand it off, and move on. Then I would not touch that kind of work for weeks. Sometimes months. I worked mostly with big companies, and big-company tracking has a rhythm to it: do it once, do it right, then radio silence until the next big fish swims in.
And every time one did, I would open GTM and feel that little jolt of "wait, how did I do this last time?" The concepts were still in my head. The specifics had quietly packed a bag and left. So back to the videos I went. The same videos. Occasionally the same video twice, simply because I had not done the thing recently enough for any of it to stick.
That is the catch hiding inside "just learn it." Learning GTM is not a one-time purchase. It is a skill you have to keep warm, and keeping a skill warm takes regular use. If your reps are months apart, the knowledge leaks out between them and you pay the learning bill again, and again, every time the work circles back. The teaching was never the problem. My calendar was.
To be fair, that is me. You might be wired differently, watch one walkthrough and have it locked in for a year. If so, lucky you, and you can happily ignore most of this article. But I suspect more of us are like me than would admit it over coffee.
So, should you?
It comes down to how much GTM is actually in your future.
If you are going to live in it, setting up tracking regularly, week in and week out, then yes, learn it and learn it well. There is no shortcut to that kind of fluency, and the two sites above will get you there faster than anything else out there. The people who skip the learning and coast on autopilot get stuck the moment something breaks, and something always breaks.
If GTM is only going to be an occasional houseguest, a handful of setups a year and then quiet, that is a different story. You will keep paying the learning tax and never quite collect the fluency, because fluency needs reps you are not going to get. Going deep is a bad trade for that person. Not because the skill is worthless, but because you will never use it enough to bank what it cost you.
That second person is the one I kept turning into, which is why I eventually built TagCompanion, a way to click on what you want to track and have the GTM setup generated for you, no video reruns required. I mention it as where my story landed, not as the moral of it.
The honest answer
"Should I learn GTM" is the wrong question on its own. The right one is "how often will I really use it," and the moment you answer that, the first question answers itself. Use it a lot: learn it, no shortcuts, no excuses. Use it rarely: do not spend the tuition on a skill you cannot keep warm.
Both are fine choices. The only real mistake is assuming the answer is the same for everyone.
And if you do decide to learn it, start where I started. MeasureSchool and Analytics Mania are the reason a marketer like me ever stopped waiting on a developer. No caveats on that one.
