Branch vs. Google Tag Manager

Branch well suited: Branch links are perfecting for embedding into our email service provider (SendGrid), paid media channels (Facebook, Google, ASA), organic media (Instagram, Facebook, content marketing, referral) and push notification platform (OneSignal) to be able to evaluate actions taken from users that clicked on those branch links. No matter the data from these links, they are accurate and are easily exported to our database and CRM to determine ROI, and find weak points in our major funnels.

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

• Click tracking: it integrated well with Facebook, Google, Clevertap, product, etc. to allow multiple stakeholders to use this one platform for tracking.
• Sale attribution: it has a robust fraud detection and event deduplication in place to attribute sales correctly.
• Smart URL: it offers different deeplinks to support basic user platforms, thus making the URL behavior smart and personalized for users.
• Referrals: it's a ready-made platform to easily launch your refer and earn program, with all checks of fraud detection in place.
• Social sharing: it offers various goats and cards for how a link will appear on various social media channels if shared, which is particularly helpful for marketing teams.

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

• Multiplayers redirection is important feature. In our marketing process for [our] Ace Tutor app https://www.acetutor.io, we have a referral reward campaign for which we want to aggregate clicks from lower level links to higher level links. For example, we created unique Branch Links for 10 marketing interns, and each intern wanted to create Branch Links for their own 10 delegates, the clicks of the Branch Links from these delegates would be automatically rolled up to the right intern's Branch Link, so we can make payment following the aggregation paths. Currently, Branch Links do not support this kind of multiplayer or multi-layer redirections.

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

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

It's very usable. Multiple teams in the company are using it, and it never takes more than 5 mins to explain to someone how to use this.

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

We have never had any issue with support response yet. In fact, they have a local POC in our city too, who routes the urgent matters to their escalation matrix.

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

Branch's links are the most consistent in the mobile space. They work across desktop and mobile, where AppsFlyer and Deeplink's didn't consistently perform in both places. Branch's measurement is more consistent across all customer touch points as well, which gives our marketing and growth teams the answers they need without any struggle.

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

• Branch had given a profound impact on the way our users share their content.
• Users now have more easy access to content created.
• Users feel more motivated in creating content because they know that it is easy to share and get their content in the eyes of the target public.

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