Google Tag Manager vs. GoSquared

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.

Incentivized

1) Maintaining customer relationships - GS just makes it so easy to respond to our users who use our product more from a tactical point of view 2) Onboarding - I think it's more or less an extension of the first point above but GS does make it easy for us to onboard new clients who are sort of beginners.

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

• Provides real-time statistics and trends which is invaluable to representative to establish solid connections with our customers
• Allows us to see current trends and product engagement. Also allows us to compare unique visitor counts with relevant dates.
• You can go big as you need, and pay as you need with instantly upgradable and affordable plans.
• Customizable dashboard is a great add-on for representatives to remove screen clutter and have clean information
• You can always directly communicate with your customers by integrating another component to your site.

• 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

• CloudFlare integration is spotty - stats in Cloudflare (tracks also Javascript off visits) and GoSquared stats are often significantly at odds
• Notifications don't seem to work very well
• Dashboard likes to re-set itself even when it was arranged & saved previously
• Weekly/ Monthly/ Yearly absolute numbers

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

Not only does the GoSquared application work well, the GoSquared team is constantly making improvements. When I first started using GoSquared, they only offered daily reporting -- now they offer the weekly and monthly feature per popular request. I like that they are always updating the look and feel of the website and emails they send to maintain a modern look. GoSquared is easy to implement and easy to use!

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.

Incentivized

GoSquared makes it easy to get started, providing everything you need to integrate the code into your site and start seeing and analyzing data

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.

The GoSquared team has always gone above and beyond to create the best analytics platform and provide top notch

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

Google Analytics is massively bloated and can be difficult to configure, navigate and understand. While GoSquared doesn't provide the feature set that Google Analytics does it focuses on providing the best experience for the features it does offer. If you just want to know who is visiting your website and when then GoSquared is a simple way of tracing this information.

• 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

• GoSquared helps us to react quickly to high volumes of traffic, and allows us to identify very quickly how engaging our content is
• Using browser specs helps us to ensure our websites are compatible with as many of our customers as possible, rather than relying on generic global stats