Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform vs. Google Tag Manager

In any scenario where we have a unique offline and online 'Person ID,' we are able to see great results with profile stitching within CDP. In cases where we do not have a unique Person ID between datasets, we find ourselves at a point where we would need to change our architecture to have the same Person ID to see results.

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

• Real time segmentation and profiling on high volume of customer data
• Integration of various customer data sources, ranging from CRM, Web Analytics, EDL and other custom sources
• Data governance of customer data in the platform, down to attribute based access controls
• Activation across paid media, marketing automation and experience optimization platforms
• Easy to use interface for marketers

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

• Some features that are not yet released to all customers are necessary to manage cases like device sharing
• The methodology of how data is stored and manage is relatively unique and requires some ramp-up to fully understand
• There are some areas, like deduplication, where the platform doesn't provide the flexibility one would expect

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

As I mentioned earlier, there are many reasons such as preparing a unified customer profile so you can easily evaluate your customers, generating segments or audiences for similar types of customers based on city, country, or attributes, and targeting them for campaigns. You can also create individual personalized journeys based on the data available at the customer level.

Incentivized

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

Activation - great Segmentation - in UI, there should be the possibility of writing advanced code Tags. Both Mobile and Desktop Data Ingestion - might be pain in the ass. Changing one customer attribute is time-consuming. It should be some super admin or some feature. One user can change some customers' attributes easily. Data Transformation - Maybe there are some modules for that in AJO?

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

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

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

Its my favorite tool in the entire Adobe Experience Platform ecosystem. I thought that its important to be connected with your customers and the best way to do it its to have a really good description to reveal what they like and prefer, that's the most important thing, so that's why I like Adobe Real-Time CDP

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

• Improved ability to target users across different marketing DSPs
• Increased click and conversion rate for Adobe Target
• Lowered opt out and bounce rates for email
• Decreased time to value on audience segmentation

Incentivized

• 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