Google Tag Manager vs. Tealium Customer Data Hub

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

Tealium Customer Data Hub is great for situations where you want to collect data from a front end data layer and then route it to multiple data tools, or if you need the ability to transform the values collected before sending. There is a tremendous amount of customizability. It has also been good for tag management of marketing/advertising tags/pixels, but could use a little improvement with regards to putting many tags on the same page. If your situation requires a lot of complexity to the marketing tags, it is still very possible to do with Tealium Customer Data Hub, but could be less complicated. Luckily, Tealium Customer Data Hub's support crew is excellent and really will partner with us and help us succeed.

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

• Simple tag management that is tough to beat. So many solutions that are incredibly simple to setup and gather data for.
• Security around the data is key and Tealium excels in this area.
• The speed impact of the tag setup is key to optimizing and allowing our web properties to run more effectively, which is a better experience for the end user.

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

• Tealium Customer Data Hub is powerful, but it has a significant learning curve. Users with JavaScript experience, developers (with a solid understanding of browser Dev Tools), and technical minded people will learn it more quickly.
• Some of the documentation seems lacking. My biggest complaint is that the documentation may explain things, but often is missing clear examples. If I had some clear examples, I could possibly avoid opening tickets for tech support.

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

Tealium continues to impress us with their focus on innovation and continuous improvement. Their support team makes use feel as though we are their one and only client. They exceed our expectations from both a product and people perspective, so we have no reason to look elsewhere!

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

Tealium iQ Tag Management System does exactly what it is intended for, it manages vendortags. Changes can be made to websites and apps in minutes. The frontend is well structured, updates are easy to carry out, and Tealium support is available at all times.

Incentivized

It's been flawless as far as I am concerned.

Incentivized

Great user interface. Easy to use. Very responsive.

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.

Support team has always been great at addressing issues or questions, by providing answer or escalating it internally to the right individual. reply response time has been always reasonable. Some responses are responded with documentation doc but in some instances the question require a non-generic answer that can create a back-and-forth conversation.

Incentivized

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

Did what we needed to onboard us onto the platform

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

Implementation had some bumps in the road and it was new for all of us, but for the most part, it was easier than many other implementations we've done with other technologies.

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

Tealium Customer Data Hub can use 1P IDs and that is the main reason we selected it. with hindsight it was a good choice in this respect Tealium Customer Data Hub can process and forward event data via api, which AAM cannot AAM connectors can be set up with a few clicks whereas Tealium Customer Data Hub connectors require support from an engineer aam machine learning tools infer a score after every event so can be used for onsite single session use cases, whereas Tealium Customer Data Hub ML infers at end of session, so is only really useful for paid media / retargeting use cases Tealium Customer Data Hub's visitor stitching approach is broad brush and irreversible; AAM allows you to merge customer profiles at your discretion depending on the use case

Like anything it could be cheaper but we still feel we get value from it.

Incentivized

Never had an issue, scales as we use it.

Incentivized

Very easy to work with and relatively cost effective

Incentivized

• 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

• There has been a near immeasurable return on customer data and improvement of our quality for our physical products due to be in tune with the customer. This has changed our way of doing things for the better to gain a better flow and overall workplace experience.
• A negative is that Tealium AudienceStream becomes harder to manuever and use data analytics for when a database has been existing for a fairly large amount of time. It goes from an agile ship to a huge vessel that takes many components to be able to move.

Incentivized