Google Tag Manager vs. ObservePoint

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

ObservePoint is a great tool for automating page testing and standardizing campaigns to observe accurate customer insights. You can identify customer mapping journey. They also help in data protection and insights which are very important and essential these days. They should work more on easy interface designs. Overall, it is the best.

• 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 UI for ObservePoint is intuitive and robust. This makes training new engineers and using the product easy and productive.
• All Audit exports are formatted as tab delimited text files making the data easy to analyze and manipulate in a Spreadsheet or database.
• The list of tag vendors that are discoverable is comprehensive making it easy to interrogate most any tagging implementation.
• Standard reporting within the UI is robust and easy to consume.

• 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

• Page details, although interesting, are not very useful as the data is too granular and not possible to integrate with other analytics data for insights.
• Some of the custom tagging may be a little complicated, so sometimes we need an engineer or an ObservePoint tech to help us out.

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

ObservePoint has a robust solution that is well supported and is continually innovating to meet new business and technology needs.

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 easy to navigate and learn. The reporting and output are intuitive and robust features for finding and identifying actionable insight.

I've only experienced one system availability issue in the 3 years we've been using it.

Sometimes it can get a bit slow when auditing particularly huge sites but recent upgrades in infrastructure have done a lot to mitigate this behavior.

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

Support is very strong indeed and has been consistent over the last 4 years. They are also friendly and tag nerds like me!

Instructor was knowledgeable and delivered the content well.

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

It's easy to find the information you need when you need it and it is easy to consume.

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

Start with small audits until you have determined what you might want to filter out.

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

I have not used any other product other than ObservePoint for my requirements. there are a number of features for which it has proved helpful. Technology Governance ensures our data collection tools and processes are executing as planned, so our organization can make better decisions based on better data and so on

Incentivized

I have not reached an unreasonable product limitation as of yet.

• 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

• ObservePoint has helped us quickly (within minutes) catch when a process or pathing on the website breaks, which allows us to fix it quickly. Whether technical/dev or analytics issues, without ObservePoint, they could have been undetected for weeks.

Incentivized