Commanders Act Enterprise Tag Manager vs. Google Tag Manager

If you need a single place where you can handle all the third party pixels, this is a well-suited platform. As well as if you want to keep the deployment independent from all other (and more complex) deployments driven by IT. If you need a pixel to be fired not just when the page loads, but based on user actions, you should use the events and that's pretty complex to handle.

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

• Creating new pixels is very easy, as well as organizing all of them, handling prioritization between different partners' pixels.
• Defining the perimeters and constraints where the pixels need to be fired is a breeze.
• Deploying the container and keeping track of all the modification is very well done.
• The configuration of the deduplication rule is pretty flexible.

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

• Reports. Tag Commander lacks in term of reports of what's happening. There is an additional module called Attribution Management System that gives you a lot of insights, but more basic reports to understand what has been fired will be useful.
• Support. Tag Commander support is very low responsive. It took several days to have the first feedback and generally, it takes a lot of emails to get what you need.
• Deduplication engine flexibility. The engine is there and it works pretty well, until you have a slightly different need. In that case you need to implement something custom in terms of implementation, reports, etc. A more flexible approach would be useful.

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

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

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

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 let us deploy new pixels/fixes to pixels independently from the IT deployment process.
• It let us easily turn on/off and sort the pixel execution based on partners' priority, assuring better data tracking for more important partners.
• It provides out of the box pixel implementation for tons of partners, but really often we need to rewrite the pixel from scratch as they're not up to date.

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