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Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager

Overview

What is Google Tag Manager?

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…

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 14 features
  • Event tracking (61)
    9.9
    99%
  • Rules-driven tag execution (58)
    8.3
    83%
  • Tag library (59)
    7.8
    78%
  • Ease of writing custom tags (63)
    7.5
    75%
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Pricing

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Unavailable

What is Google Tag Manager?

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,…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Falcon?

Falcon is a web analytics tag auditing tool which gives insights on missing and incorrectly configured analytic tags, marketing pixels, and tag management tools on a website. It supports monitoring a critical path for future discrepancy and alerts in case of any errors caused due to changes. Falcon…

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Product Demos

Aori Tutorial Demo Full Google Ads SKAG Setup

YouTube

Server-Side Tagging in Google Tag Manager (First Look & Demo)

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How to Setup Google Tag Manager for Clickfunnels: Step by Step

YouTube

Codeless Insight Tags Using Google Tag Manager

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A/B testing with Google Tag Manager - demo of gtmtesting.com

YouTube

Track Add to Cart in Google Tag Manager

YouTube
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Features

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

9.8
Avg 8.6

Tag Management

Features related to tag management

8.1
Avg 8.0

Data Management & Integrity

Features related to data management and integrity

9
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager Integrations

Google Tag Manager Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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 free.

Reviewers rate Event tracking highest, with a score of 9.9.

The most common users of Google Tag Manager are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(231)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-24 of 24)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Andrea Hester | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our web development team uses Google Tag Manager not only to manage tags on our own website, but those of our clients. It's a great way to enable easy addition and management of tags for things like analytics, social media, and advertising, without having to work in the website's code.
  • Enables broader management of tags
  • Ensures optimal tag placement and low impact on performance
  • Makes updating tags quick and easy
  • Integrates nicely with analytics
  • As with a lot of Google products, it's not the most user friendly
  • Steeper learning curve for those unfamiliar with code
  • Doesn't have a very robust native knowledge base for training - but there are lots of external sources of training and tutorials elsewhere
Google Tag Manager is nice for companies with marketing teams who need access to inserting and managing tags for things like social media and advertising, without having to burden the web development team for help. It's less appropriate when the site is very complex or there are special considerations with custom tags that could impact performance.
Wes Finley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Updating the website to include numerous tracking codes from Google, FB, Hubspot, Linkedin and others can be difficult. It is much easier for us to add a single Google Tag Manager code snippet to the site and modify or add tags within the tag manager interface. This allows us to make changes with a lower risk of breaking the site.
  • Reduce risk of site failure
  • Allow marketers to update tags without making code changes to site
  • Create and track unique site conversion events
  • The UI is a bit confusing if you are less technical
  • [Google] Tag Manager could be better integrated with other Google services like Google Analytics.
  • Still not sure how effective tag manager is on mobile following IOS14 uodates.
Any time we need to add or update a site tracking tag we use tag manager. I can easily add other admin to tag manager and review historical changes to make sure no one breaks things. If you use many tracking tags then I would highly recommend tag manager, but if you only have 1 or 2 tags or it is very easy for you to make site code changes tag manager may not be necessary.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Tag Manager was implemented by our public affairs department. However, the statistics that come along with using the tracking code are shared with any department that requests them. Google Tag Manager addresses the problems that come along with determining if your marketing efforts are successful or not. The way we use GTM allows us to verify which items are utilized on our website and if our campaigns are successful.
  • Creation and implementation of campaign-specific tags to track your marketing efforts
  • Integrates with Google Analytics so all of your statistics are in the same place, allowing you to easily pull reports that contain all of the data you need to know
  • Allows you to track website activities outside of Google Analytics, such as pdf views/clicks
  • Google Tag Manager was extremely difficult for me to set up on our website. I think additional documentation of implementation would be helpful
  • Maybe my knowledge of Google Analytics is not as high as I imagined, but setting up GTM within our GA account was a little difficult as well, thus the need for additional consumer-friendly knowledgebase articles or tutorials
  • It would be nice if the tracking code for GTM was already included in GA, so I wouldn't need to work with our website management folks to add another tag. They accidentally removed our GA tag while adding the GTM tag which resulted in lost tracking for us. Frustrating.
Google Tag Manager is well suited for an organization that has at least one dedicated individual to manage the implementation of the tracking code, review statistics, and manage and adjust the marketing tags as needed. It would be less appropriate if someone does not have the time to dedicate to the platform. In that case, they could just use bit.ly links to get a basic overview of how well certain campaigns are performing.
Quentin Aisbett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Tag Manager is brilliant in that it provides marketers and agencies alike be able to implement and deploy immediately without having to hassle or wait for developers to action.
  • Ability for non-developers to deploy tags without requiring developer assistance
  • Utilise event triggers to leverage better insights within Google Analytics
  • In general it could be more user-friendly for those less-technical
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the backbone of our website tracking at our company. It is used by both our Analytics and Web Development departments to create a structured, versionable environment for web pages, events, and pixel tracking. GTM solves many issues that allow non-developers to be able to add code to a website all without needing to add code. For instance, if you need to install a heatmap, GTM has built-in tags that allow you to simply put your tracking ID and you're good to go. It's a fantastic, free tool that I cannot recommend enough for any analyst to have in their repertoire.
  • Event Tracking
  • Web Tracking
  • Pixel Tracking
  • Custom Events
  • Platform Integration
  • Cost (Free)
  • Tutorials are sparse from Google. No official course.
  • GTM is manually tracked. No automated click to track function.
  • Integration quality varies depending on the application.
GTM is well suited for any company that wants to collect data into Google Analytics for an affordable price (free). It is fairly easy to learn but you will need to dedicate time to letting someone train with it, which can take significant time if no one has prior experience. If your team does not have the bandwidth to give this to someone to learn, GTM will be far less effective and you should consider paid alternatives.
Tsahi Tal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it in various ways.
For marketing use, we implement advertising pixels from the main platforms - Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, outbrain and more.
We use it to implement screen recording solutions A/B testing solutions and much more. Basically, anything that requires light code integration which we can do with Google Tag Manager without touching the website's code.
  • Quick implementation of code without touching the site
  • Easy goal implementation with custom triggers
  • Quick and easy publishing in a click of a button
  • Testing integrations could be easier
  • Simplifying the custom trigger implementation would help less technical users
  • Would be good if it had better explanation on new platform integrations
As mentioned before, this is the go to tool for any marketer out there.
Best for quick pixel and triggers integrations, easy to use for remarketing platform implementations and much more.

The platform can improve by making easy-to-understand custom trigger implementations for less tech-savvy users.

Definitely, the first thing I implement on a site before starting any setup phase.
Dave Becker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Tag Manager to enable the use of tracking pixels from various sources on our website. Our website was developed and coded by an agency, so Google Tag Manager allows us to integrate these codes without having to edit or modify the coding of the site. We can then track user behavior concerning our business.
  • Google Tag Manager allows you to see the source of incoming traffic to your site and track their behavior (make purchases, abandon carts, etc.)
  • We can implement Google Tag Manager in-house, so we don't need to pay our developer to make changes or edit code for us, saving us money.
  • Google Tag Manager is easier to use than coding a website, but you still need to have some technical knowledge.
  • As someone with fundamental coding knowledge, if you set up a tag incorrectly, it can take a long time to figure out why the tag isn't working properly.
If you have the time to learn what Google Tag Manager can do, and know some technical coding info or are willing to learn, it is a great solution to implement tracking pixels. If that doesn't sound like you or if you have tried in the past and can't get it, you might want to hire someone to manage it for you.
Alec Dibble | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Tag Manger is used across the public-facing web properties to manage web tagging/pixel placement in production and staging. It allows you to dynamically install tags and disable them without having to push new code. It has a lot of customizability but some of it still needs coding integrations and pre-planning to work smoothly. With proper setup and training, a non-coder, like someone on a marketing team, should be able to add new website tags themselves using Google Tag Manager.
  • Google Tag Manager makes it really easy to view and manage all of your third-party marketing tags/pixels in one place.
  • Google Tag Manager allows non-coders to easily implement new marketing and ad tracking services that rely on web pixels or trackers.
  • It does a poor job of letting you create separate staging/dev environments. It requires a lot of setup and could be much smoother and integrated into the experience.
  • Even with the debugger, it can be really tough to see values that have been passed from your backend into the scripts.
I think Google Tag Manager is a good fit for any company that utilizes several marketing, ad and/or analytic services. Once it is set up correctly, it minimizes the engineering effort to do pixel/tag implementation. It also is much easier to audit tags in Google Tag Manager vs spread out across a codebase.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We manage a portfolio of 50+ independent websites and utilize Google Analytics (GA) as our primary web analytics tool. Due to the large number of sites and already being a GA user, we decided to implement Google Tag Manager as our tag management solution so that we could better integrate with GA and have a free tag management solution that wouldn't cripple us financially.
Google Tag Manager solves our needs of managing marketing tags and reducing IT needs around deployments for tracking snippets, and it's free!
  • Google Tag Manager integrates with other Google tools (Analytics, Ads) very easily.
  • Google Tag Manager meets the standard requirements of tag management software, and while it isn't the most feature-rich option out there, it really does get the job done!
  • Google Tag Manager is great for less sophisticated tagging/rules, such as for websites that are smaller and less complex (which most of ours are).
  • Google Tag Manager doesn't offer a very streamlined interface for organizing and categorizing tags.
  • It can be difficult (or inefficient) when managing many sites in the same Google Tag Manager account, since it isn't easy to copy tags to other accounts.
  • Google Tag Manager isn't as full-featured or robust as other tag management software, so I'd be somewhat concerned using it for more complex tagging and management.
Google Tag Manager is a great tool for marketing and analytics teams, which empowers them to implement and manage a wide variety of tracking scripts. It also removes the need for IT support for deployments (as any tag management software should help do).
Google Tag Manager is great for basic and moderate level tagging, but I would caution against using for more complex tagging, and would consider looking at a paid provider instead.
Ellen Evans | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Add tags without a dev team! What a dream for small e-commerce teams. Though this is a very powerful tool, which can sometimes be dangerous, I love that Google has an easy way for Analytics users to tag their sites. Though some technical knowledge is required (knowing what the DOM is, about what the data layer is, and how triggers, tags & variables work together), this is a very easy, straight-forward interface for tag implementation.
  • Tags custom events with ease, tracking clicks and form submissions.
  • VERSIONING! Yes, thank you very much! The ability to revert if something breaks once pushed to prod.
  • Collaboration between teams, and adding users and permissions, is easy.
  • The debugger tool could be improved.
  • Bring back the classes/certification! Google removed this from the academy last year.
  • More hand-holding for custom variables and tracking. I've hit a few roadblocks since I don't know Javascript.
For small eCommerce teams that don't have a full dev team for support, this product is your friend. Stop waiting on the dev team to tag something or implement a pixel, use GTM! I am such a fan after understanding the capabilities and the red tape it eliminates. Get your work done faster, just invest the time to learn this product.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is being used by our marketing team to better track customers through Google Analytics (GA) primarily and is only used by our marketing team. The integration between the two is absolutely crucial for any digital marketing team to understand and utilize. Without the use of GTM, it's incredibly difficult to do any advanced GA goal and event tracking. Due to its versatility, we're able to accurately report on our user behavior through GA in ways that we were never able to before. This allows us to better A/B test landing pages and improve our website experience for our customers.
  • Flexibility is critical. Being able to easily trigger actions on our website through Tag Manager saves me time in development and stress in the deployment of these tags. Not having to write a line of code and having the ability to trigger events on specific button clicks or scroll depth is nice, but being able to trigger events anywhere you can run a JavaScript function is incredible.
  • Ease of use. It's great to be able to safely give other members of our digital marketing team access to GTM and trust that they can successfully navigate the platform, understand what active tags are doing, and create new tags.
  • Testing and debugging. I'll also list this as a con for one small reason, but in large it's simple to test and see which tags are firing on specific page views, on button clicks, etc. Additionally, you can see every action that GTM tracks (and in turn create new tags based on those).
  • In the debugger, it can sometimes be a frustrating interface. The drawer from the bottom of the screen is large and can be frustrating to navigate. While it gives you all of the information you need and after some time you get accustomed to the organization of it, it would be nice to have a more fluid interface to debug and read the output of GTM
  • GA custom events have become more complicated with GTM. Once you understand the data layer, it is incredibly powerful, but not being able to use a simple GA Send command to push a custom event into your Analytics account is a bummer.
Any scenario in which you want to do any level of analytics on web traffic is very well suited for GTM. It can trigger third-party pixel events with custom HTML tags as well as any of the native tags that are built into the system, so it can help the less technically savvy marketer implement the solutions they historically would have to ask a webmaster or developer for help with.
Santiago Valdés | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Tag Manager in the marketing department, but we do it in conjunction with the technology department.
GTM makes it extremely easy to add code to the site, which can be extremely useful if you want to add a tracker, snippet or something related to a marketing, tracking, analytics or similar software (Adwords, Facebook Ads, Email marketing, Hotjar, Analytics, etc.)
Before GTM you had to add the code yourself to the site, which (1) can be very slow depending on your org bureaucracy or technology department and (2) can be way more inefficient that doing it with GTM, because it optimizes the code to keep it smaller.
This way you can be very agile from a marketing perspective without wasting time on technical issues.
  • 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.
  • For someone who's just starting, it can be overwhelming to understand how it works. Onboarding is not easy and even thought it has improved a lot since it started, still has a way to go so you can actually understand what's going on.
  • Documentation is very poor and generally you are on your own if it doesn't work right. Try searching for GTM gurus like Simo Ahava or ask forums, but general use cases or more docs don't exist.
  • Debugging is a bit hard. Even thought you have the test functionality (which is useful) in some cases when you reload the page or the action takes you to another page (form submit, redirect, etc) it can be hard to debug.
If you have a marketing department that wants to be agile and measure valuable goals for your company, then GTM is the way to go.
You will be able to track almost any event of value that you want on the site (without adding any extra code, thanks to auto-event listener), add new marketing tools if needed in minutes and send events to multiple platforms.
This has huge value for your company if you think about it: measuring your efforts quickly and changing course if it is not working can save tons of money. I believe almost anyone who has a site on the internet can benefit from it because of how much time it saves (considering it's even free!).

Just beware: GTM opens the door so you can add any piece of code you want. Someone without much experience can overload the site or affect site speed.
J.P. VanderLinden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GTM makes creating scalable, repeatable analytics setups much easier for franchises. It's also great for marketers who want to be more nimble and not be locked behind IT or engineering to get new systems or optimizations deployed. We keep a standard implementation for those just getting started using GTM with easily swappable variables, and then layer on additional tracking / prompts / software tags as needed.
  • Code injection is simplified with Tag Manager. Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, Marketo Munchkin, HubSpot tracking, Hotjar, CallRail, the list goes on. One stop, no constantly bugging the devs to install new code.
  • Need to track onsite events? Build a single listener or trigger, and apply that trigger to countless different applications. A user form fill can trigger an AdWords and Facebook conversion, tag a Hotjar recording, signal deployment of a pop-up or just about anything else javascript-driven.
  • GTM is basically coding light. For non-developers who might be terrified of GitHub, it makes features like version control, forking/branches and draft / deploy mode approachable.
  • 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.
If your site has been using plugins to inject tracking or javascript deployment, they are likely adding unnecessary bloat. If the lag time to get new tracking in place feels like an Ice Age because marketers have to talk to developers and then get in line, there's a faster way. If you want to have a single place to check for whether tracking is installed that ISN'T the source code, GTM is your friend.

And you can't beat the price.
JC Matthews | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I'm using Google Tag Manager across my whole website. It allows me to track all the data points for managing customer acquisition cost as well as determining how good a specific campaign is doing and what expectations on a monthly basis I should be looking for on each specific product that we offer. Since we offer several different insurance products (around 10) we're able to use Google Tag Manager to tag each specific link that a customer may click through in order to purchase a product.
  • Google Tag Manager allows you to track specific links very well
  • Google Tag Manager allows you to track clicks on HTML data such as forms
  • Google Tag Manager allows you to have multiple triggers for specific tags
  • Better training on how to use the product
Google Tag Manager is well suited for service and e-commerce businesses scenarios like tracking specific data especially for specific products tracking click-through rates as well as sales. I will say is less appropriate if you don't have a large number of things to track or a much smaller business is starting off you might want to try and outside tracking system because it is extremely complicated.
Bobby Stemper | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Tag Manager is being used to track website behavior and simplify the deployment process for website javascript, event tracking, and essential third-party integrations. It solves the business problem of needing engineers to assist in website development, marketing analytics, and other business side projects necessary to understanding how our customers, leads, and visitors interact with our various web-based applications and websites.
  • Super easy implementation
  • Great guides and documentation available
  • Awesome tool that helps marketers acquire more technical skills
  • Potentially dangerous tool to give access to non-technical marketers
  • Educational resources could be more specifics
  • WordPress implementation could be easier
Google Tag Manager removes the need for deprecated documentation or anything complicated that your company would lose track of. It replaces a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth between different teams within a business. It lets marketing work more independently of the rest of the company and allows for quick iterations and quick fixes. It also is really helpful if you have clients that use it because permission sharing is great.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is used to connect multiple website tracking tools.
  • It's much easier to set up something like a Facebook Pixel when you go through GTM, especially if you don't code.
  • There are a good number of preset integrations.
  • Technical Customer Service can assist well if you run into difficulty setting it up.
  • Some coding knowledge is needed to set up advanced features. GTM could have more pre-set integrations.
  • Setting up tags and triggers is a somewhat confusing structure in the beginning.
GTM is useful when you are planning to install multiple types of tracking, such as Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to your website.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Tag Manager to monitor our website traffic and gather insights about our visitors. The whole organisation is using it and we are upgrading our current website alongside implementing GTM. It solves several problems. Firstly, it helps us get to know the demographics and behaviours of our visitors. But then we can also set goals to track visitor journeys throughout the site.
  • As it is connected to other Google services, it is easy to integrate and connect to them.
  • The interface is much simpler than it used to be and there is a lot of help online if you need guiding through the process.
  • It stores your usage data, so it is easy to keep track of what changes you have made.
  • It is quite easy to tell where you have gone wrong if something is not working.
  • You have to be relatively tech-savvy to use it.
  • There are other tools available which make it easier to run experiments.
  • Keywords are missing in the search console due to privacy issues. Which is good as a consumer, but not for a marketeer.
I would recommend it, as the insights are extremely valuable when connected with Google Analytics. If you want to know the age, gender, nationality of your users this is the tool for you. If you want to know what users click on, what pages they land/exit on, or see their journey through your website, then this is the tool for you. However, it is quite technical and can be hard to use unless you have a step-by-step guide. This tool does not show you videos of your users on your website, or heatmaps, or provide reasons behind their behaviour. Nor have I found a way to get notifications.
Chris Lenhart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google tag manager (GTM) is a great way to handle all of the code snippets you need without having to bug your devs. It is also great for tracking custom interactions, again without needing to bug your developers to implement something and deploy. If you can write the JavaScript to find it on the page, GTM lets you measure it. It even allows you to set local and session storage variables to help you understand more complex user behavior.
  • Measuring custom interactions. If you know a bit of javascript, you can set yourself up to measure anything that happens client side on your site, no matter how complex the sequence.
  • Out of the Box triggers. Even if you aren't great at javascript, you can set up interactions pretty easily.
  • Independent deployment. You can create, manage, and deploy your tags yourself without waiting for your developers to deploy.
  • No retroactive measurements. If you haven't set up a measurement, there's no way to go back in time to find it.
  • Finicky javascript syntax. It can be picky about how it accepts scripts.
  • Interface changes a lot. It's usually an improvement, but it can make learning difficult because old tutorials quickly become obsolete.
You should use Google tag manager if you have someone on your staff who has analytics and development chops, and you are interested in measuring interactions that go beyond simply what page was viewed or what button was clicked. If you need to handle retargeting ads specific to a particular interaction, or you want to measure interactions in a particular sequence over the course of a session, google tag manager is great.

If your organization lacks someone with these skills, look into a solution like Heap if you are small enough.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our Growth engineers are using Google Tag Manager to implement and manage various marketing, analytics and sales tracking scripts on our clients' websites and landing pages. We are also using it to implement highly customized events for every web property in order to track specific actions that the website's visitors perform on the website, and feed that data to Google Analytics for further analysis and optimization of the website's performance.
  • Script management: Google Tag Manager allows almost anyone to implement, modify and manage scripts on a website in an easy and user-friendly environment.
  • Version control: Google Tag Manager allows you to create editions of your website's scripts and roll back/forth between editions in an easy manner.
  • Custom event implementation: using Google Tag Manager you can implement custom events on a website (e.g. button click) which are then pushed automatically into Google Analytics for monitoring users' behavior.
  • Documentation: the existing documentation is not enough, given the countless features and possibilities available through Google Tag Manager
  • User onboarding: somebody unfamiliar with Google Tag Manager might have a hard time becoming familiar with the interface and functionality on their own
  • Google Tag Assistant, a crucial companion of Google Tag Manager does not seem to be working correctly most of the time.
Recommended for all infrastructure-heavy website developers, who need to manage a variety of scripts and functionality on a website. Recommended to front-end/back-end developers, digital marketers, growth hackers, and marketers with some technical experience who like to get hands-on with customizing and implementing marketing solutions. Not recommended to those unfamiliar with technical subjects, as its setup and operation might seem complex and frustrating.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[It's] A powerful tool which is very easy to use both for the marketing team, the business analysts, and the developers. This is crucial for digital projects requiring a mix of all these different skills.
  • Workspace and version management
  • Auto-event tracking
  • AdWords compliancy
  • Google Analytics compliancy
  • Many options to define triggers: CSS, selector, built-in triggers (form, click, URL,), custom variables, etc.
  • Tags sequencing
  • Almost unlimited advanced use possibilities with the custom HTML tags and custom JavaScript variables
  • Data layer variables
  • Compliancy with Optimize AB test solution
  • Data intelligence (rule-based automation)
  • Collaboration (for multiple organizations working on the same container)
  • Use Google Analytics audience data to fire the tags
Best solution if you use Google Analytics. It may not be the most appropriate solution when you need to [have] tags fire synchronously.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Tag Manager is used by all clients who have tools outside of the Adobe suite (Adobe has its own TMS which comes free with the Web Analytics platform). GTM is simple, easy to use, has enterprise level features (such as multitasking), has its own debugging panel and the best part is that GTM documentation is public and abundant which is untrue for any other TMS.
  • Ability to add custom tags which do not have templates.
  • Easy integration with other tools that are part of the Google Suite.
  • User friendly interface and help section.
  • To publish a tag, the entire container needs to be published or a new workspace needs to be created. Some TMSs have the functionality to activate a tag without having to publish an entire container version.
  • It does not support advanced inbuilt functions such as cookie storage. But, custom scripts can be written.
Less appropriate if the organization has multiple websites/departments who want their own profile. In this case, if a tag has to be configured for more than one website, it will have to be configured equal number of times. A TMS like Tealium has the functionality to add script libraries where the tag will work for multiple properties even though configured just once.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization primarily uses it to fire ad pixel tags. It is much faster to set up these tags in Google Tag Manager (GTM) than it would be to implement them in our website code. This saves our company time and allows the business to operate more efficiently. Since GTM is a pretty technical tool, only our developers and experienced GTM users have access to it.
  • Many built in tags and variables to choose from. This helps users get up and running with GTM quickly.
  • 'Preview and debug' mode makes it easy to test code before deploying to the production environment.
  • Widely used by many people in the industry, so there is a lot of community support for Google tag manager.
  • It doesn't track offsite activities. This is problematic for businesses that are largely reliant on offsite activities that are managed by other systems.
  • It would be very useful if google tag manager could automatically pull in data from other systems (ex. advertising APIs, databases)
Businesses that are primarily run on the website and don't require server-side activities are a good fit for Google Tag Manger. However, businesses in which server-side processes are key aspects of their business will not find it as useful for managing all of their analytics tags.
David Gailey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
With more than a dozen third party vendor and analytics tags, and a slow development release cycle, our website needed a way for business/marketing users to more rapidly test and deploy new tags and changes to existing tags. Although setting up a data layer on our current platform proved challenging at times, the benefits to the marketing team were well worth the effort. Google Tag Manager allowed them to get data faster, iterate quickly and ultimately make actionable decisions within days instead of weeks. There are paid services that offer the same, however, this free service allows decision makers a low-risk, easy-in, feature rich solution to tag management.
  • Easy to use interface that our marketing users were able to quickly pick up on.
  • Tag debugging system allows for a great way to test tags before they are published.
  • Versioning and publishing system allows easy rollback and version tracking for your tags.
  • Depending on the integration, sometimes the rule, tag and macro lists can become so long that they seem unwieldy. This can slow down the marketing user. A method of better organizing these lists could prove helpful.
Ask yourself if your IT capacity or deployment process is slowing down your marketing and analytics departments. In our IT department, we were able to free up a decent percentage of several front-end developers' workload. Upon launch of Google Tag Manager on our site, we put a great amount of tagging responsibility in the hands of our marketing department.
Brian Massey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Gives marketers more control of their ability to measure visitor behavior.
  • Gives marketers more control over adding features to a site.
  • Hides details making implementation of site features easier, especially Google Analtyics.
  • Great versioning infrastructure allowing you to roll out and roll-back changes.
  • Strong preview and testing tools keeps you from bringing the site down.
  • Well integrated with Google Analytics so you can use advanced features.
  • Hiding of technical details (such as Google Analytics) may make debugging difficult.
  • Gives marketers enough rope to hang themselves by injecting Javascript, CSS and HTML changes.
  • Because it's powerful, it requires pretty extensive QA.
  • Doesn't support A/B testing software like Convert.com, Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely.
  • Can quickly require some strong technical expertise for more advanced measurement setups.
Google Tag Manager is easy enough to implement that it is worth trying. It can be easily removed if it doesn't fit for your business.
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