From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps, thus gaining the benefits of data standardization and speed of deployment. Google touts an agency friendly system with multiple user access, and tools to improve tags performance like debugging, and rules, macros or automated tag firing. The Google Tag Manager also integrates with Google product DoubleClick. Moreover, Google Tag Manager is…
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OpenText Optimost
Score 7.0 out of 10
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OpenText Optimost is designed to help companies deliver engaging, profitable websites and campaigns and includes self-service capabilities. Optimost also provides white glove consulting to help companies test confidently when the stakes and complexity are highest; immediately when speed is of the essence, and to match the perfect content to every customer.
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.
The ease of implementation combined with the managed services result in a tool that virtually anyone can use - implementation is less than 10 lines of code added to the relevant pages of the website (we simply added it to our master page template to have it available on any page) and from there the customer can be as involved or not involved as they wish. At BSI we are very hands on with the testing programme - usually developing and designing the tests ourselves and having HP build them, but if we wanted to HP to develop, design and build and limit our role to QA and review that is an option.
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.
Because it is a managed service the need for intervention by our internal IT group was removed. This allowed us to control the pace of the testing programme without being influenced by IT resource allocation
The client and technical account managers are very good at suggesting tests or potential improvements
HP regularly holds custom forums which are always informative and provide an opportunity to learn from and network with peers and industry leaders
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.
The dashboard interface is difficult to navigate, but I understand that they are currently developing/testing a new much more user friendly interface
The cost can be a barrier for some organisations, but for us it is worth it. Also they are in the process of releasing a less expensive self authoring testing tool.
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.
We have not only renewed our subscription three years running, but we have added the self authoring tool and are looking to expand the subscription so that we can take advantage of the managed services on a global level.
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.
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.
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.
We evaluated Optimost again Adobe's similar offering (Target). The big difference between the two and the reason why BSI choose Autonomy was the managed service aspect. The idea that once the code was deployed on the site IT no longer had to be involved gave my team full ownership of the testing programme. With the Adobe product, the involvement of the internal IT group would have been required to launch each test - and this would have decreased the number of tests we could run each month. Back in the day I also used offermatica/omniture and this too required IT involvement.
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.
Use HP Optimost was the primary driver behind a 40% increase in UK classroom training courses booked online read more details here: http://www.autonomy.com/work/news/details/hsx6767d
HP Optimost testing led to a 9% increase in sales by improving the BSI Shop's checkout funnel in 2012
HP Optimost is integral to the success of BSI's continuous improvement testing programme
