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…
GTM is great for site tagging & tracking!
The Leading Tag Management App
Using Google Tag Manager to simplify tracking code management
Google Tag Manager - Not as Easy as I Thought 😬
Wouldn't Want To Live Without It
An easy to use tool for small busineses
GTM: Best in Service for Free
Google Tag Manager - Your Codeless Integrations Goto Tool
For marketing use, we implement advertising pixels from the main platforms - Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, …
This is the tracking tool you need to be using
Great Tool - Especially for Newbies!
FREE and POWERFUL software which allows to manage various tracking codes from one place
Google Tag Manager lets you track custom events on your website without having to change your website code.
Quick and Easy Tags
Excellent Tag Manager With a Learning Curve
Awards
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Popular Features
- Event tracking (61)9.999%
- Rules-driven tag execution (58)8.383%
- Tag library (59)7.878%
- Ease of writing custom tags (63)7.575%
Pricing
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…
Product Demos
Aori Tutorial Demo Full Google Ads SKAG Setup
Server-Side Tagging in Google Tag Manager (First Look & Demo)
How to Setup Google Tag Manager for Clickfunnels: Step by Step
Codeless Insight Tags Using Google Tag Manager
A/B testing with Google Tag Manager - demo of gtmtesting.com
Track Add to Cart in Google Tag Manager
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.
- 9.8Role-based user permissions(53) Ratings
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.
Tag Management
Features related to tag management
- 7.8Tag library(59) Ratings
The software natively supports a variety of vendors, including the most important or common ones such as Google and Adobe.
- 8Tag variable mapping(52) Ratings
The software allows users to manipulate data and map it to known variables in the tag without custom development.
- 7.5Ease of writing custom tags(63) Ratings
The software allows users to create and implement custom tags when a certain tag is not among the available templates.
- 8.3Rules-driven tag execution(58) Ratings
The software allows for flexible tag firing based on multi-part load rules, as well as tag sequencing and dependencies.
- 7.8Tag performance monitoring(55) Ratings
The software tracks things like tag load time, blocking tags, uptime / response time, and tag killing, and sends alerts.
- 8.3Page load times(46) Ratings
The tag management software has helped improve page load speeds.
- 8.4Mobile app tagging(32) Ratings
The software can manage tags for mobile apps as well as websites.
- 8.7Library of JavaScript extensions(35) Ratings
The software offers a library of pre-built JavaScript functions for use with tags and load rules for data manipulation, UI functionality or data collection.
Data Management & Integrity
Features related to data management and integrity
- 9.9Event tracking(61) Ratings
The software tracks events such as form abandonment, video plays, downloads, parallax scrolling, and infinite scroll.
- 9.8Mobile event tracking(44) Ratings
The software tracks mobile-specific interactions, such as zoom, rotate, and dialing phone numbers.
- 8.6Data distribution management(39) Ratings
The software manages the collection and distribution of data among various technologies.
- 8.7Universal data layer(55) Ratings
The software utilizes a set of universal data made available through the browser, server, or HTML content.
- 7.9Automated error checking(44) Ratings
The software automatically detects and alerts users of code errors.
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager Integrations
Google Tag Manager Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(231)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-24 of 24)The Leading Tag Management App
- 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
Using Google Tag Manager to simplify tracking code management
- 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.
Google Tag Manager - Not as Easy as I Thought 😬
- 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.
Wouldn't Want To Live Without It
- 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
GTM: Best in Service for Free
- 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.
Google Tag Manager - Your Codeless Integrations Goto Tool
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
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.
Excellent Tag Manager With a Learning Curve
- 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.
Google Tag Manager is a solid choice for web tag management
- 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.
Google Tag Manager is a great tag managing solution for less complex websites and tagging needs.
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 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.
- 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.
GTM saves time and simplifies advanced analytics
- 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.
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.
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.
Fast, Lightweight, a Great Entry to Tag Management
- 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.
Tag Your Money Manager
- 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
- 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
Understand what people are doing on your website with GTM
- 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.
- 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.
GTM - The most open and powerful analytics tool out there
- 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.
If your organization lacks someone with these skills, look into a solution like Heap if you are small enough.
Best tag management system out there
- 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.
Currently the best tag manager
- 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
GTM - the King of Tag Management Platforms
- 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.
- 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)
A great, free, low-risk tool to test and deploy tags faster
- 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.
Google Tag Manager-More Control for Marketers
- 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.