From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps. It is a free option, vs. the company's enterprise-tier Google Tag Manager 360.
$0
Kissmetrics
Score9.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kissmetrics is a customer engagement automation platform. This solution includes behavioral analytics, segmentation, and email campaign automation.
$150
per month
Pricing
Google Tag Manager
Kissmetrics
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Growth
$500
Monthly Tracked People
Power
$850
Monthly Tracked People
Enterprise
Custom
Monthly Tracked People
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Tag Manager
Kissmetrics
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$1,500 per installation
Additional Details
—
What are Monthly Tracked People?
Monthly Tracked People are unique visitors that engage in an Event on your website or with your product, that gets tracked by you in Kissmetrics.
Monthly Tracked People can be anonymous or identified.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Tag Manager
Kissmetrics
Considered Both Products
Google
Verified User
Chose Google Tag Manager
We looked at Kissmetrics but we wanted an all-inclusive product that is fully integrated with Google Analytics, so we opted to go with Google Tag Manager. It's reassuring to know that our data will always be accurate, and can be accessed via one login (Google Analytics). This …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The more events you track and properties you send along, the more you can see how specific users use your product/service. The user based timeline gives you a perfect start point to get in touch with users, because you can see where they get stuck.
Tracking your traffic sources and how they influence conversions is awesome. You can get a perfect view of how much a traffic source contributes to revenue.
Funnel reports give you more insights into micro and macro conversion steps and give you actionable data to work with.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Installing.... yes this is also a negative. While you can install and have the program running in minutes, if you use Unbounce, the form tracking process is quite complicated!
Updates... I feel like the product updates have slowed a lot lately. Thankfully, the product functionality is so amazing that it hasn't impeded the use of it. However, it is still disappointing to see less frequent software updates.
Occasionally clunky UI... there are a few reports that are really easy to mess up and leave you scratching your head on why it isn't showing you any data.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Price sensitivity and the different choices that now exist in the Analytics industry. I think it makes sense for us sometime this year to rethink our analytics strategy to see how we may leverage the best of GA (which has included lots of new features and updates the past years_, Kiss and other tools as need be
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Right after login, you'll get to a dashboard which shows you a quick view on how your business is doing across the events you are tracking. There is no need to dig deeper than that unless you want to, in which case it's very easy to do so just by clicking on the metric on which you want more information. The interface is very intuitive.
The application was very rarely down; during the period we used the application, I can think of only two or three occasions in which the site was down. Notably, at no time was the the performance of our own site compromised as a result.
Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Our front-line product support person (Mika) is great. She is responsive and great to work with.
However, the data accuracy issue described earlier is the reason for the low score here. This issue was escalated from front-line to support to level 2 technical support and then it disappeared into a black hole. Escalations, in general, do not go well. We get no response for days, or I have to chase things down. This is not acceptable. Marketing metrics are critically important to me and I need answers quickly. I cannot afford to wait around for days / weeks for a response.
Just to be clear, these comments only apply to escalated support issues.
Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.
I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Kissmetrics is a next-level step up for people who are used to getting their tracking and reporting from Google Analytics or Shopify's CMS. While HubSpot arguably has a better user interface, Kissmetrics certainly has the power and usability necessary to track important conversion data and help you make better marketing decisions.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Unfortunately for this client (small business) the cost of Kissmetrics was just too prohibitive. But it's obvious that for a larger company that can afford it, the data would be invaluable to gain more insight in how to gain more active users and orders for a funnel.
The data provided really increases an understanding of how best to provide the right experience for the users...happy users equals increase in ROI.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
