Adobe Audience Manager is a data management platform (DMP) that is integrated into the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
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Google Tag Manager
Score 9.3 out of 10
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From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps. It is a free option, vs. the company's enterprise-tier Google Tag Manager 360.
If you are already using multiple other pieces of the Adobe Experience Cloud stack, adobe audience manager is an easy choice. It allows for quick and easy data activation for your first and potentially brokered 2nd party data. However this product will likely be absorbed into the adobe experience platform (AEP) soon. In the end I would wait to see where adobe is truly headed with this product before investing heavily without additional heavy adobe investments.
I have found Google Tag Manager as the go to solution for managing all of your event and conversion tags for your website. Not only does it make it easy to manage all of your tags in the one place, it is fairly intuitive to use and there is plenty of videos and help documentation online to help set up what ever you need. No scenarios come to mind at the moment on where it is less appropriate to use.
We are able to generate reports that provide valuable insights into potential customer behavior, allowing us to better focus our marketing efforts.
By allowing us to understand who are key audiences are and how they overlap with other brands and products, AAM allows us to get a fuller picture of how we should target our audience.
Reporting in AAM is wonderful in that it is easy to understand and exportable. The use of graphics and updates make it easier to share insights with various team members--even those with minimum experience in marketing and analytics.
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.
I haven't found another option for us to use especially one that is free. Down the road we may go a different route but for now GTM is a good option and does what we need it to do. It'd be nice to get more support or more integrations but with the free version there's only so much one can expect to get I suppose.
Overall usability is great, as are most of Adobe's software. Maybe a UI refresh could make it a bit easier to do advanced functions or reporting but, overall, it works very well. This is something you take for granted with Adobe solutions because when you try another vendor you realize how bad it can be.
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.
AAM has good support, but the support is not as available, due to waiting time and queue. The instructions presented are available, but it navigation is not easy between pages. However, instructions are usually direct and straightforward, but any underlying thoughts or questions won’t be easily answered without support from their service.
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.
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 personally like the Adobe Audience Manager interface and it's easier to use for beginners. It also has some features that Google does not, nor do its other competitors. It is worth the money and time spent, overall. I feel like it gives a bigger and more in-depth picture to our company's audience than other programs.
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.
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.
