Coveo Qubit vs. Google Tag Manager

Coveo Qubit is a very helpful platform mainly for organizations that need to provide a solid business model before carrying out any implementation or new functionality. In addition, it is a very good tool to generate changes and show different content to different types of clients, with their personalization and segmentation criteria.It is ideal for simultaneous testing and customization, only one of these activities individually is not recommended.

Incentivized

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

• Qubit platform uses solid testing algorithms and delivers reliable reporting and analytics of testing campaigns. The dashboard section is easy to use and provides a good high level overview of the core campaign metric performances.
• On-boarding and implementation of Qubit technology was painless and well handed throughout the entire process even with more complicated platforms.
• Turn-around time for development and testing of campaigns is extremely fast. This enables the business to have a much higher throughput of tests and allows for quick validation of ideas rather than having to wait for months before a test is ready to go live on production site.

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

• While they do work very closely with us, especially our success manager, more involvement on a technical level or a dedicated engineer, would be a great advantage. We develop a lot of experiences in house and, like all companies that dev in house, we have our own way of working. A dedicated engineer that got to know us better as well and understood how we work could only help. Sometimes, a few errors can get through QA due to this.

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

Qubit is currently providing resources and support we do not have internally. Our relationship managers are exceptional and I feel well informed and well supported by their team. The tool is nice, but our contacts from the company are the real reason to maintain our relationship. They work hard for clarity and continue to help us push for additional opportunities.

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

Very simple user interface, built on top of advanced functionality, makes the platform easy to use. The team at Qubit are also very open to feedback and introduce new and useful features fairly often. On the reporting side, the inbuilt dashboard reports are good for a top-level view of test results, and Qubit have made a lot of their output data available should you wish to run your own analysis

Incentivized

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

I would say that the Qubit account managers are always available for any request. We have a lot of different promotions that could always do with last minute optimizing or changes and Qubit can be relied on to get this changes up and running in an impressive amount of time, so that we don't need to patch live or wait for the next IT sprint. Invaluable to our business.

Technology is good for A/B testing and personalisation - allowing any team with a dedicated developer to create test relatively easily and to report/analyse them in a fair amount of details. Some advanced features, especially on the set up of test cells, are dearly missing. Unfortunately, new features are often not free of bugs... Also, support is sub-par, which means new features are realised without proper documentation, example or training (but of our Qubit counterparts and internally).

Incentivized

Qubit are supportive and flexible in providing support. They are happy working out of usual hours, even on weekends and if I have any doubts about the set up of an experience they’re quick to respond and willing to check my work. On particularly big revenue days they monitor our account and they’re quick to identify and problem solve any issues.

Incentivized

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 training was great, but would be great to have a script or PDF with some explanations of the qubit JS layer. Without the script you can just try to learn on your own, so the training is not as powerfull as it could be. On the other hand - would be great to have training related to reading statistics or personalisation.

Incentivized

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

Implementation couldn't be easier. All we needed to do was insert the tag. (easy) and set up the data layer. (dev required) This was pretty smooth in comparison to some of the other tools we use on our site, and was done in less than a day. Note : Data needs to be collected for a set period of time before you can accurately rely on the data that you are receiving. This is normal though with everyone else that we have used

Incentivized

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

At the time of taking the product, we found no comparable alternatives. Since then, the product has only grown from strength to strength, so it still does not have any comparable competitors that offer both the technical product and business knowledge that Qubit can. Google appear to offering a competing product which may be one to watch in future, and something for Qubit to keep an eye on

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

Our requirements change throughout the year like most E Commerce retailers. At Christmas and Peak we're dealing with around ten times the usual traffic on the site. Qubit had no problems with this at all, tests continued to fire, and stats were still reported accurately. I don't think that it is the most server intensive .js anyway, but we have seen no issues at all.

Incentivized

• Faster recognition of customer needs - finding out exactly what customers are doing when they come on site.
• Assessment of online assets for effectiveness and improvements - facilitated the analysis of 500 online feedback questionnaires for a campaign.
• Mapping out lead conversion and helping identify opportunities to improve it.

• 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