GTM is a powerful, flexible tool with a clean integration with other Google products. However, it lacks the server-side capabilities of its competitors.
March 30, 2017

GTM is a powerful, flexible tool with a clean integration with other Google products. However, it lacks the server-side capabilities of its competitors.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google Tag Manager

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)
  • Positive, it has helped our marketing team optimize campaigns quickly because they were able to easily add ad tracking pixels to the website via google tag manager.
  • Segment.io
Segment.io, unlike GTM, is able to handle server-side activities. However, GTM has a much nicer and more flexible integration with GA. Currently we are using both tools.
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.

Google Tag Manager Feature Ratings

Tag library
10
Tag variable mapping
9
Ease of writing custom tags
8
Rules-driven tag execution
10
Tag performance monitoring
10
Page load times
8
Mobile app tagging
10
Library of JavaScript extensions
8
Event tracking
10
Mobile event tracking
10
Data distribution management
8
Universal data layer
10
Automated error checking
9
Role-based user permissions
10