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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SendPulse
Score 8.7 out of 10
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SendPulse is an integrated messaging platform providing user communication that includes emails, SMS, web push, SMTP, and user management.. This solution includes 15,000 free emails with up to 2,500 subscribers per month.
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Pricing
Google Tag Manager
SendPulse
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Tag Manager
SendPulse
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Pricing starts from $9 a month and depends on the number of messages sent.
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.
SendPulse is great if you want to connect with your list on a more personal basis, and making sure that your email reaches your subscriber when it is best for him/her. You can also use the SMS function (though I haven't used it yet). Let's say you have clients and want to send a message to them automatically on their birthday, SendPulse allows you to do that. It allows you to add in specific fields that are relevant to you, in order to customise your messaging as much as you want and need.
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.
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.
I like its Drag and Drop function to design e-mailers but it lacks in some functionalities. Foe example when I write two different contents in a same box I need a line to show separation between my contents in the same box but this feature is unavailable in SendPulse.
They should include more fonts. Every product or service needs different kind of fonts to make a right impact on customers. With limited option of fonts it restricts user's creativity.
It is good to have templates to give users some idea for designing campaigns but here SendPluse has nothing much to offer. They have very limited number of templates.
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.
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.
I find that overall SendPulse is very intuitive to use and the support is there to help you out in case you don't find how to do what you wish to do. The drag and drop functionalities make it easy to create the newsletters you want. Every field is explained and small tutorials are included to show you how to create a new template, newsletter, etc. which makes it very easy to use.
Every time I contacted the support team with a question or a problem, they were very fast in replying and helping me out solve it. Usually latest within 10 minutes I would receive a first answer, and the problem would get solved on the same day.
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.
For SendPulse's price point, I consider their competition to be the likes of Mailchimp, ConstantContact, etc. While SendPulse rates roughly average across the board in all areas, for businesses looking for the cheapest option (which comes with a lack of features/quality), ConstantContact beats them. For quality/features/value, I'd say Mailchimp is the best option for small businesses.
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.
