AB Tasty vs. Google Tag Manager

A/B Tasty tool allows us do easy testing without burdening our limited developer resources all the time. Reports are simple enough to interpret. Support has been excellent and proactive, also the onboarding was successful. It is also an advantage that we have the possibility to drive all our traffic to the test versions rather than being limited to specific user amount per month. We can recommend A/B Tasty for testing purposes, as the platform keeps it’s promises, doesn’t require too much technical knowledge and the support is excellent.

Incentivized

I use Google Tag Manager (GTM) daily and create tags/triggers for all of our client's websites. It is easy to set up but for some of my tasks, the process does get repetitive so it'd be nice to have a default setting I can use when I have to create accounts, and then tweak/add things to them as needed. It is a great way to collect data and have code on the site without having to log into the site builder all the time. It makes it convenient to make edits or add code after our client's sites go live with us.

Incentivized

• Customer-focused. Over the past year, AB Tasty has worked with us to overcome many obstacles (e.g. tracking hurdles, ITP issues, etc.). The team always finds a solution in a timely manner to ensure we're able to execute on experiments.
• Reliability. One of the biggest hurdles earlier this year were the ITP regulations set out by Apple. Over 40% of our ad traffic was Safari users. AB Tasty was using 3rd party cookies but quickly migrated over to a local session storage solution that circumvented the issue.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Sometimes the platform is a little glitchy and requires a refresh.
• Would be great to be able to see the experiments and projects on a timeline with their status and main result to have an immediate view of ongoing and completed projects.
• Email notification for when an experiment reaches a certain confidence level.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

AB Tasty's tool as well as the support team completely met my goals on A/B Testing. Editing a test is really easy and AB Tasty made the marketing team free to launch nearly any test. Reporting is also easy to set up and give us the information needed to keep improving transformation on landing pages and forms

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.

Incentivized

The tool’s usability is excellent, with a smooth and intuitive interface. It is continuously updated with new features and improvements aimed at enhancing the user experience. Setting up experiments and personalizations is straightforward, thanks to a well-structured process that even less experienced users can easily follow. There are sometimes small issues with the QA section which slows the QA process but it is so much better now compared to 2024.

Incentivized

No difficult obstacle to overcome but Google Tag Manager can still be difficult for many users to deploy. Sure the basic HTML script can be deployed quite easily, but when you start to require triggers, variables, etc, it can be a little daunting.

Incentivized

Support is good, but it would be better if it was quicker or if AB Tasty provided a quicker SLA. At times, you require stuff urgently but AB Tasty support isn't as quick as I personally like it to be.

Incentivized

GTM does not provide support. This is one of GTM's biggest issues but it's due to the level of customization for each website. If your team thinks they would heavily rely on the need for a support staff it is probably better to invest in a paid service with a team that can support your needs.

Incentivized

There is a vast amount of training available on their online platform, including their university area of which you can get certified for (and then share this with your connections on platforms such as Linkedin). There is also specific hand created training which can be provided by your customer success manager if that is requested by yourself.

Incentivized

I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.

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.

Incentivized

We selected AB Tasty mostly because we got a sense that their dev and customer service teams were going to go above and beyond to help us out. We were right! The cost was also a factor as they came in a small bit lower, but cost wasn't the only factor.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Since we use AB tasty our conversion rates have significantly increased on the Watch pages.
• We can report positive comments about the evolutions of our interfaces, from our expert users. And so improved customer satisfaction.
• The solution allows us to validate or invalidate without taking major risk while gaining in reactivity, our proposals relook pages.
• Commitment rates are much higher, multiplied by 2 or 3, when we implement customizations that are relevant. These customizations are very relevant insofar as we are governed by the seasonality of events as a media site.

• 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.

Incentivized