Google Analytics is perhaps the best-known web analytics product and, as a free product, it has massive adoption. Although it lacks some enterprise-level features compared to its competitors in the space, the launch of the paid Google Analytics Premium edition seems likely to close the gap.
$0
per month
Google Tag Manager
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps, thus gaining the benefits of data standardization and speed of deployment. Google touts an agency friendly system with multiple user access, and tools to improve tags performance like debugging, and rules, macros or automated tag firing. The Google Tag Manager also integrates with Google product DoubleClick. Moreover, Google Tag Manager is…
Universal GA is free to use, offers a good amount of data, and is relatively easy to use. Other products may not offer the detail needed (Google Tag Manager), or require payment (Adobe Target)
Google provides a wide suite of products that all tie into Google Analytics. Some that I use most often are Tag Manager, Ads and Datastudio. All of these connect directly with Analytics and allow me to accomplish my goals. For example, Ads will connect and show me what Ads are …
Google Analytics (free version) is typically my go-to recommendation for most companies. Small to medium size businesses, definitely. Larger organizations with need for a complex account structure / hierarchy and the need for highly customized analytics metrics, dimensions, …
We tested Webtrends and purchased Omniture (which we used for 2 years). Webtrends wasn't a good fit overall. Omniture was too cumbersome and expensive. The support was HORRIBLE and for a paid product it lacked some basic, no-brainer features.
Google Tag Manager is naturally the first one to implement as I use Google Analytics. However I do use the others too as they provide functionality that GTM doesn't. But you do also have to pay for some of these functions. I use these tools for growth hacker marketing, so …
We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has …
Tag Manager works in conjunction with Google Analytics. I would describe analytics as a 101 level course, and Tag Manager as a 401 level course. Both are good, both are relevant, but one will far outpace the other as far as practical application and things that you will benefit …
GTM is very user-friendly, cost-efficient, and easy to implement, and it also provides the features needed for our team to be more efficient and agile.
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Chose Google Tag Manager
We typically default to GTM since it is free and provides a majority of the benefits you are looking to achieve by implementing this kind of tool. The paid solutions are great but typically reserved for a more niche client base that has very specific needs.
Google Tag Manager is a little different than the other software we've used. This not only gives us the means for tracking our websites but it also tells us if we've implemented the tag correctly and how well the website has been performing after the tag has been implemented …
My subscription with Adobe comes with the full suite of their products, including DTM. I tried using their tag manager but found that it was much more challenging to use than Google Tag Manager. It also seemed more limited in the way it worked with our AdWords account, which …
Google Tag Manager does what others can't for Google Ads, for example. That's why it's a must-have for any website owner who plans to market their website. In addition, it makes the implementation of various other tracking tools very simple.
Google Tag Manager has many training resources online that our team relied on when recommending to clients why they should use GTM. It's one thing to share a recommendation with a client, it's another to be able to train them on it. I haven't seen these available resources for …
Google Tag Manager is slightly trickier to implement and involves more coordination with the client's website developer, but it's much more flexible and robust. The tagging and pixel structure that is native to the social platforms is perhaps easier to work with, but it's as …
We looked at Kissmetrics but we wanted an all-inclusive product that is fully integrated with Google Analytics, so we opted to go with Google Tag Manager. It's reassuring to know that our data will always be accurate, and can be accessed via one login (Google Analytics). This …
Google was free, powerful to use, and easy to pick up. We couldn't find any better reason to use it. I am sure there are advantages that some of the competitors have in the space, but for us, the ability to manage users and keep versions of changes, along with the familiarity …
5 reasons why Google Tag Manager has been chosen, and is finally a good choice: Cost to Customer, auto-event tracking, data layer customization and modularity, a library of built-in tags and variables, public documentation and community support.
GTM is powerful and free, don't need to pay more for the easy stuff. If you are a corporate guy with money to invest and really heavy use of advertising and analytics you may select Tealium. If you are a small or medium size company this [GTM] is the solution you are looking for.
On most of my projects I never felt the need to use another Tag Management System. One client from a finance sector, wasn't able to use GTM because it is a cloud service. We were looking for TMS which would be possible to host in own infrastructure, but we haven't found any …
Simpler to use and comes free of cost. It has enterprise level features and gives strong competition to any other TMS. If a company has Google Analytics or any other Google Suite product, GTM will easily integrate with it. The only reason I can think of as to why you should use …
Segment.io, unlike GTM, is able to handle server-side activities. However, GTM has a much nicer and more flexible integration with GA. Currently we are using both tools.
Google Analytics is particularly well suited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior on a grocery e-commerce platform. It provides a wealth of information about customer behavior, including what products are most popular, what pages are visited the most, and where customers are coming from. This information can help the platform optimize its website for better customer engagement and conversion rates. However, Google Analytics may not be the best tool for more advanced, granular analysis of customer behavior, such as tracking individual customer journeys or understanding customer motivations. In these cases, it may be more appropriate to use additional tools or solutions that provide deeper insights into customer behavior.
Google Tag Manager is well suited when the marketer or marketing team does not work closely with the developers. In this scenario, it means that the marketer can deploy 3rd party tools such as live chat widgets, advertising pixels, and much more themselves in a timely manner. Google Tag Manager may be less relevant in an organization where the marketer is also the developer or has a strong development background, where they can implement the 3rd party tags directly on the site when they need. But even in this instance, there's still great benefit in using Google Tag Manager.
Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.
There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.
We will continue to use Google Analytics for several reasons. It is free, which is a huge selling point. It houses all of our ecommerce stores' data, and though it can't account for refunds or fraud orders, gives us and our clients directional, real time information on individual and group store performance.
Google Tag Manager makes tracking traffic to our websites effortless, which enables our developers to focus on other tasks. Setting up a new instance takes only minutes and additional scripts can be added/modified without touching the source code of a site in production. This enables our marketing directors to coordinate tests and experiments with minimal effort.
Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, down to minute levels. That is it's greatest detriment: find the right information when you need it can be a cumbersome task. You are able to create shortcuts, however, so it can mitigate some of this problem. Google is continually refining Analytics, so I do not doubt there will be improvements
Google Tag Manager is the definition of a learning curve. At the beginning, you can barely do the minimum and it can seem questionable as to why you would use it. However, as users begin to learn its offerings and see how it can do much more, they will have a moment where GTM becomes a tool that empowers their ability to track and efficiently collect data for important business questions.
We all know Google is at top when it comes to availability. We have never faced any such instances where I can suggest otherwise. All you need is a Google account, a device and internet connection to use this super powerful tool for reporting and visualising your site data, traffic, events, etc. that too in real time.
This has been a catalyst for improving our site's traffic handling capabilities. We were able to identify exit% from our sites through it and we used recommendations to handle and implement the same in our sites. We have been increasing the usage of Google Analytics in our sites and never had any performance related issues if we used Analytics
The Google reps respond very quickly. However, sometimes they can overly call you to set up an apportionment. I'm very proficient and sometimes when I talk to reps, they give beginner tutorials and insights that are a waste of time. I wish Google would understand my level of expertise and assign me to a rep (long-term) that doesn't have to walk me through the basics.
love the product and training they provide for businesses of all sizes. The following list of links will help you get started with Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented by Google Analytics.
I think my biggest take away from the Google Analytics implementation was that there needs to be a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it before you start. Originally the analytics were added to track visitors, but as we became more savvy with the product, we began adding more and more functionality, and defining guidelines as we went along. While not detrimental to our success, this lack of an overarching goal resulted in some minor setbacks in implementation and the collection of some messy data that is unusable.
Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.
I have not used Adobe Analytics as much, but I know they offer something called customer journey analytics, which we are evaluating now. I have used Semrush, and I find them much better than Google Analytics. I feel a fairly nontechnical person could learn Semrush in about a month. They also offer features like competitive analysis (on content, keywords, traffic, etc.), which is very useful. If you have to choose one among Semrush and Google Analytics, I would say go for Semrush.
We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.
Google Analytics is currently handling the reporting and tracking of near about 80 sites in our project. And I am not talking about the sites from different projects. They may have way more accounts than that. Never ever felt a performance issue from Google's end while generating or customising reports or tracking custom events or creating custom dimensions
GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement.
With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation.