Adobe Dynamic Tag Management (discontinued) vs. Countly vs. Google Tag Manager

If you're on the Adobe stack at all, you absolutely need DTM. It will make your life infinitely easier. It's so simple to update your Adobe Analytics code and have version control, and when we implemented Adobe Target, it took literally less than 15 minutes for me to do. I also think it's significantly simpler than Google Tag Manager. I went through all manner of difficulty when implementing tags on that and have not had similar problems on DTM. If you're frequently placing pixels, it's a great tool that will speed their deployment. The only situation in which I think a tag manager is not appropriate is if you have a dev with too much time on their hands. Otherwise, get a TMS and get DTM.

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Whether you're planning to include it into a website or a mobile application, this arrangement is simple to implement. The best feature has to be its superb "division," which allows you to delve deeper into your data without using SQL-like queries. On Ubuntu, the free "group version" can act organically aided.

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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.

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• It is a rules based tag management system that allows the application of tracking pixels much easier than hard coding.
• By placing 2 pieces of code on the top and bottom of each page of a website, we can create rules that track certain events and relay the information back to Adobe Media Optimizer and Google analytics.
• It has simplified the coding process so one doesn't have to generate tons of gory javascript to deploy on each individual page to get tracking.

• Open-source and Self-hosted - Countly can be completely self-hosted, which makes it really easy to offset costs of a competing service like Segment or Mixpanel for early-stage companies.
• A large number of SDKs and platform support - Countly provides fairly comprehensive support for mobile applications and general tracking. As a result, it's pretty easy to create comprehensive tracking of events for any company.
• Custom queries, access to data - You have instant access to data and extensive customizability which makes this platform fairly easy to use for any purpose of user and market tracking.

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• 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.

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• It is only available with Adobe Marketing Cloud so you can't buy it as an independent product.
• It is easier to use than Google Tag Manager, but not nearly as popular.
• Whereas Google Tag Manager is free, Dynamic Tag Management must be purchased as part of Adobe Marketing Cloud.

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• No specific thing in mind. All is good except sometimes the customer service lags a little when you have problems setting up the tool.

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• 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.

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As it interfaces so well with AMO, we shall be utilizing the DTM for any future client additions.

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.

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It is easy to use at a basic level, however without JavaScript resource you will struggle.

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.

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Although it is a newer product to Adobe, they seem to truly care about our challenges and are very proactive in making sure that we have the most knowledgeable support available in a timely manner.

Countly practically does everything you need it to do. However, it can have challenges of its own sometimes.

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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.

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

It was quite seamless with the outstanding support from our Adobe account manager.

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.

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Adobe DTM provides a more secure data analytics solution. It is customized and best used on large scale deployments of websites with pages 10,000+. The Adobe Analytics tool, once learned, is very easy to use and provides more robust, customized graphics and ability to export data to "securely" via FTP from the cloud to SQL database.

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Countly have two main elements that make it the better option. First is open sourced so you can edit with code new options and new events, also you can use a variety of plugins depending of the necessities of the users and the objectives of every analysis. The second characteristic is that is very easy to use and even if is open source and the code could seem complex everything is very intuitive.

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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.

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• The key factor is that my devs are not tied up with petty things like adding JS or advertising pixels. Simple work like that can be handled by me while they work on feature development.
• Release cycle is much shorter when a dev is needed, say for a direct call rule that involves JS being written. We don't have to go through the normal release cycle and can do it on an ad hoc basis without all the rigmarole of a hot fix.

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• Allowed me to understand my customer on a deeper level
• Allowed me to tweak my content and sales pages
• Allowed me to better understand my target market.

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• 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.

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