GTM gives speed and tools to really increase your ROI (for free!)
October 19, 2018
GTM gives speed and tools to really increase your ROI (for free!)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Tag Manager
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.
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.
- Impact is in many ways. First, how much money and time we save by not having to add each piece of code every time, just load GTM once and then make changes over there.
- Second, how much money we have saved by being able to change course fast with our marketing campaigns and business objectives. We are able to measure the things that return value to our company, so we've been able to change landing pages, buttons, events and more complicated processes after realizing that they weren't working as expected. This might sound obvious (you should measure everything) but in practice is not that easy and it may take a lot of time. GTM makes it easier.
So far we've only used Google Tag Manager, we haven't tried anything else.