AppsFlyer vs. Google Tag Manager

Appsflyer is excellent for running numerous campaigns across many clients and keeping track of real-time performance. Attribution is top-notch and the platform is up to date with the innovations in the area while keeping its effective & trustworthy information. Exporting reports could be a bit more friendly but all in all, a truly great MMP.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Appsflyer does deep linking well. It was reliable and works better than any past partner we've used. We no longer invest time and resources in fielding internal flags about broken links.
• Appsflyer does particularly well at telling the story on industry landscape, identifying areas of opportunity for our brand to grow based on the depth and breadth of their experience in mobile.
• The Appsflyer team offers best in class customer service. The account managers are knowledgeable, responsive, bright, invested and a pleasure to work with.

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

• Supports download of only 200K rows of raw data for in-app events
• Supports download of raw data of in-app events for only 30 days duration max and for the last 90 days
• Custom reports are limited.
• Need to download raw data for deeper analysis
• Cannot look into parameter level events without raw reports

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

AppsFlyer works well with our use cases already, and is working on addressing the gaps (of trackers UI)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The UI can be used by anyone with a little understanding of the business. However, may features are somehow hidden and the UI is a bit confusing for beginners. It's not so easy to know where each feature is. It is also not easy to figure out how certain values are calculated.

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

Overall support is good, fast to respond and helps us with both tool related queries as well as publisher related escalations when it comes to fraud or attribution, as they step in and help justify on our behalf. They have a very small team though in India, it's time for them to scale up the team probably and assign exclusive support folks to large clients.

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

Appsflyer is generally a more comprehensive and robust platform offering advanced analytics, detailed attribution, and strong fraud prevention features compared to its competition in the market. Also, Appsflyer is a pretty old and well-known name in the market.

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

• Allows us to make sure that we're meeting our advertiser's performance and optimize accordingly. Which keeps our business on going.
• Allows us to stop spend on inventory that's not performing well to save money on those placements.
• Allows us to identify fraudulent inventory and get our money back from our traffic sources.

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