CallRail vs. Google Tag Manager

This is great software for differentiating where phone traffic is coming from. Whether it's paid/organic search, you can see exactly where the calls are coming in from. I'd love to see them add text/SMS features in the future, but it does what it claims. I'd also like to see more CRM integrations, but not sure that other users share the same sentiment

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

• Tracking phone calls first & foremost! Being able to have a running tally of the phone calls made and listening to the recorded calls throughout the month and providing that information back to our clients is vital!
• Their UI is exceptionally easy to use & navigate. This is important when we have many clients running at the same time and we are able to always determine what report is for which client.
• The ease of setting up a brand new client & their tracking phone number is fantastic! Saves a lot of time when it walks you through everything you need to know & do step by step.

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

• The integration with Hubspot is not as seemless as I would have liked. We had an issue where a person who was already in Hubspot called in, and their contact information was not matched to the caller ID correctly which created some duplicate entries. A little bit of a bummer, but from what I understand they may have fixed this. We had to stop using them for a little while because our outsourced sales team was more confused by adding CallRail, so we'll be re-implementing this once our new sales team is fully trained. Hopefully the record miss-match issue gets fixed.

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

The platform is easy to use and we really don't have any complaints with using it so far. The information is invaluable for clients that rely on phone calls to drive more business. Not much negative to say about it at this point. We're actually really happy with it so far and the cost is manageable.

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

CallRail support normally gets back to us pretty quickly when we submit a ticket and they have a good knowledge base for common questions. I've heard mixed reviews from other local marketing agencies that use this tool, but overall in my experience, support has been knowledgeable and quick working through our problems.

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

Callrail has a very seamless and easy to use Dynamic Number Swap function. In other call tracking that we looked into the integration was either not as easy to use or required much more work to implement. Setting up CallRail has been so easy even our entry-level employees need very little training to master the platform.

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

• It is useful to monitor our calls weekly. We can give our employees feedback on the quality of the calls which helps our overall sales and conversions.
• By knowing which campaigns perform best, we can shift our budget to target those campaigns specifically which saves us revenue and increases sales.

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