AppsFlyer vs. Google Tag Manager

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AppsFlyer
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
AppsFlyer helps brands make good choices for their business and their customers through innovative, privacy-preserving measurement, analytics, fraud protection, and engagement technologies. Built on the idea that brands can increase customer privacy while providing exceptional experiences, AppsFlyer empowers thousands of creators and 8,000+ technology partners to create better, more meaningful customer relationships.
$0.06
per conversion
Google Tag Manager
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps, thus gaining the benefits of data standardization and speed of deployment. Google touts an agency friendly system with multiple user access, and tools to improve tags performance like debugging, and rules, macros or automated tag firing. The Google Tag Manager also integrates with Google product DoubleClick. Moreover, Google Tag Manager is…N/A
Pricing
AppsFlyerGoogle Tag Manager
Editions & Modules
Growth
$0.06
per conversion
Zero
Free Forever
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppsFlyerGoogle Tag Manager
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppsFlyerGoogle Tag Manager
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AppsFlyerGoogle Tag Manager
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
AppsFlyer
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
9.8
53 Ratings
14% above category average
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings9.853 Ratings
Tag Management
Comparison of Tag Management features of Product A and Product B
AppsFlyer
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
8.1
64 Ratings
1% above category average
Tag library00 Ratings7.859 Ratings
Tag variable mapping00 Ratings8.052 Ratings
Ease of writing custom tags00 Ratings7.563 Ratings
Rules-driven tag execution00 Ratings8.358 Ratings
Tag performance monitoring00 Ratings7.855 Ratings
Page load times00 Ratings8.346 Ratings
Mobile app tagging00 Ratings8.432 Ratings
Library of JavaScript extensions00 Ratings8.735 Ratings
Data Management & Integrity
Comparison of Data Management & Integrity features of Product A and Product B
AppsFlyer
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
9.0
64 Ratings
8% above category average
Event tracking00 Ratings9.961 Ratings
Mobile event tracking00 Ratings9.844 Ratings
Data distribution management00 Ratings8.539 Ratings
Universal data layer00 Ratings8.755 Ratings
Automated error checking00 Ratings7.944 Ratings
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AppsFlyerGoogle Tag Manager
Small Businesses
Smartlook
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Score 8.5 out of 10
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Adobe Experience Platform Launch
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Flurry Analytics
Flurry Analytics
Score 9.0 out of 10
Adobe Experience Platform Launch
Adobe Experience Platform Launch
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Flurry Analytics
Flurry Analytics
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Tealium Customer Data Hub
Score 8.7 out of 10
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User Ratings
AppsFlyerGoogle Tag Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
9.6
(44 ratings)
9.7
(68 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(6 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(13 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
6.0
(3 ratings)
8.3
(11 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.8
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppsFlyerGoogle Tag Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
AppsFlyer
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.
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Google
Google Tag Manager is well suited when the marketer or marketing team does not work closely with the developers. In this scenario, it means that the marketer can deploy 3rd party tools such as live chat widgets, advertising pixels, and much more themselves in a timely manner. Google Tag Manager may be less relevant in an organization where the marketer is also the developer or has a strong development background, where they can implement the 3rd party tags directly on the site when they need. But even in this instance, there's still great benefit in using Google Tag Manager.
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Pros
AppsFlyer
  • 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.
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Google
  • 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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Cons
AppsFlyer
  • 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
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Google
  • 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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Likelihood to Renew
AppsFlyer
AppsFlyer works well with our use cases already, and is working on addressing the gaps (of trackers UI)
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Google
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.
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Usability
AppsFlyer
No answers on this topic
Google
Google Tag Manager is the definition of a learning curve. At the beginning, you can barely do the minimum and it can seem questionable as to why you would use it. However, as users begin to learn its offerings and see how it can do much more, they will have a moment where GTM becomes a tool that empowers their ability to track and efficiently collect data for important business questions.
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Support Rating
AppsFlyer
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.
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Google
It depends wether you are seeking official support from Google itself, in which case it would be rated very low because it's not their business model, they would rather have you work with one of their Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP). In terms of self-served support, Google offer extensive documentation at https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/, recently revamped training (https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course05/preview), has active forums and user community (https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104865292981489764063) which can typically answer even the most advanced questions.
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Online Training
AppsFlyer
No answers on this topic
Google
I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.
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Implementation Rating
AppsFlyer
No answers on this topic
Google
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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Alternatives Considered
AppsFlyer
Adjust is the best, followed by AppsFlyer. The rest are a joke and should be ashamed of themselves for putting out products that don't give marketers the insights they need to facilitate growth or identify fraud.
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Google
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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Return on Investment
AppsFlyer
  • Allowed us to measure ROI correctly. We couldn't before.
  • Cut our Facebook ad and Google Adwords costs per install almost in half.
  • Added a few extra cents to each install, but it's worth it when looking at the optimization of the ads.
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Google
  • 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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ScreenShots

AppsFlyer Screenshots

Screenshot of Custom dashboard.Screenshot of Engagement and retention dashboard.