Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Free services provide a wonderful resource for people on tight budgets. If willing to put forth work in data managing/analysis and If basic high traffic information or drilling down specific users in low traffic situations is needed, then StatCounter may fit your needs. If automation and low overhead are a high priority then some more expensive packages can provide the same and more information with less hassle. Because StatCounter is free, there is low risk to see if StatCounter works in your specific usage scenario.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review I can visit my site in real time showing pages visited and the duration of the visit. It shows very detailed data on where visitors came from. I could monitor the performance of campaigns in real-time as visitors came to my site from a promotion. Charles Rogel Vice President of Product Development and Senior Consultant
Read full review Cons 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. Read full review I would like to see our referral traffic ranked in order of most to least. I'm not sure if this function exists already, but if it does, I do not know how to do it. Maybe put the average time on site on the same chart as the visitors and page views graphs. I feel as though some tasks can be streamlined, but this is not just unique to statcounter but to other analytics sites I've used. But people like digging really deep into the data, but for people like me who use it for one purpose, a shorter one-stop-shop version would be nice. Like one page where everything can be seen. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review I have not had any issues with malfunctions when using statcounter, so that would lead me to continue using the program. I would like to see more social media measuring tools, but again, we don't use the program to dig really deep. We're just looking to figure out who is reading what articles on our website are the most liked. And it helps lead our editorial team in the right direction.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review I never have to call tech support and never get frustrated because I can't get the information that I need.
Read full review Support Rating Read full review Online Training I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Wish StatCounter had a more comprehensive report feature comparable to
Google Analytics . I feel StatCounter is easier to use and to understand when compared to Google. Some people prefer
Google Analytics , but it provides so much more information that the average person really needs. It meets basic needs. If you are looking for something more robust and high level of detail, I would recommend
Google Analytics instead
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review StatCounter enabled us to track what works and doesn't work with regards to driving web traffic. On a personal use level, StatCounter enabled me to gauge how much additional effort I needed to make to reach the traffic levels needed on my website. Read full review ScreenShots