Crazy Egg vs. Google Tag Manager

+ I strongly believe that this tool helps when a firm has good user count (depends on business model) as most of these tools are data friends. More data - more valuable insights + Best fit if someone who is looking for deeper insights of individual page - Not suggested for very fewer visits of a website. Suggested to improve better visit count

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

• Provides heatmaps that shows you the elements on your site that are and aren't performing well.
• Provides scrollmaps so you can see how far down a page users are scrolling and which content never gets seen.
• Screenshots show you how your website looks across a variety of different devices.
• Provides a type of clickmap called confetti that enables you visualise clicks by segments - device, new/returning visitors, campaigns and other metrics.

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 largest thing we've struggled with is the Optimizely integration. I've contacted customer service a few times to get it properly setup. Customer Service is always friendly and helpful; they provide clear steps to get it setup. Unfortunately despite clear instructions, they are tedious, and if not completed in the correct order, the integration with Optimizely does not work. My success rate with the integration is less than 55%.

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

It's a great tool considering how inexpensive it is. If used correctly and you have a plan for tracking your websites, this tool can make a world of a difference. If you are not going to sit down and take the time to make a plan for how to use this tool, I would say it is not worth your time. Yes, you can look at items on your website that need to be changed, but without a consistent plan, other important items that need changing can be lost in the mix. Make sure you have enough time and energy to invest in this and it will be well worth it

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

Crazy Egg is extremely easy to set up and use, and very well done from a user experience standpoint. It is really helpful that I can give stakeholders access to the interface and get them interacting with it with minimal training. The A/B testing is the easiest I have ever used, with minimal performance impact to the website.

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

It's slow to post data, and slow to get a snapshot to finally be active (i.e. not pending). Not intolerable, but would be nice to see data within a couple hours. Often have to wait to the next day.

I think support is an area where Crazy Egg is lacking. I would love to have a quarterly check-in with a Crazy Egg rep to understand what kinds of changes have been made to the platform and what is on the horizon. I also think a quick consulting sessions with a rep could be extremely beneficial, as I'm sure there are ways to use the tool that we haven't even thought about yet that would be extremely insightful for our team.

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

Crazy Egg is the best CRO and LPO tool for performance marketers who have a limited budget!

I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.

It is simple. JavaScript code needs to be added to any pages where you want to run tests. That's it.

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

I will say that I didn't evaluate or select Crazy Egg, it's been a legacy tool that has been at the company before me. Honestly, we're not even sure of all of the features/functionality that we can use. Me, as a UXR, I think there are some other tools that would help me more in gaining visibility into what our users are doing on our website. I've evaluated other tools that are more aligned with UXR. However, if we properly paired it with experimentation, this might be more of a valuable tool for us.

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

Its reliability (not scaleability, as the question asks for, sorry) is pretty good but through our testing we know that some clicks do not get recorded. It doesn't bother us a lot because we look at the aggregate of thousands of visits, but we do know it misses things. As for scaleability, it's about right. You really don't want zillions of clicks per snapshot - the screen just turns to 100% dots and you lose the ability to differentiate different screen areas. We find that 25,000 clicks for a page gives us a really good view.

• Very Positive impact on ROI as it pointed towards some specific flaws of the website. These flaws were removed on a regular basis.
• It constantly helps finetune our website to the requirements of the users. This helps in boosting our business development efforts.
• It helps us to remove or modify the least visited sections of the website. Thus removing the limitations that hamper our growth.

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