Google Tag Manager is a solid choice for web tag management
January 18, 2020
Google Tag Manager is a solid choice for web tag management
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Tag Manager
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.
- If setup correctly, it enables companies to spend much less engineering time on deploying tags. Additionally, deployment is instant. Companies don't have to do their normal code deployment process.
- Allows multiple people to manage tags with it's version control and testing features.
- Segment
I think Google Tag Manager is hard to beat, given that it is a free service Google offers. It also requires you to implement most of the integrations manually, it doesn't have many built-in. Segment, in contrast, is much easier to get up and running and "just works". However, it is relatively expensive.