5 ms·

Google Tag Manager

72 points by hartard 14y ago

kalid 14y ago
Looks very useful, but they need to update their landing page text. "Tag" is way too overloaded. As a user of Google analytics, etc. I didn't realize what this was. Something like: "Tags are the snippets of code you've had to manually include on your website, like analytics or conversion tracking. Tag manager includes the code automatically, without any website changes."
AminShawki 14y ago
One problem with tag management systems and the whole concept we noticed is the hassle it can be spending a lot of time searching for those tags in your website's code, especially as a marketer. So we created a tool that finds tags in your website's code and generates a report of all tag locations for you. TagInspector.com will save so much time automatically pulling tag locations for you and sending you a report, definitely worth a look. We're looking for any feedback and hopefully this saves you some time and trouble!
bialecki 14y ago
Very interesting. I started a service like this a few months ago called Add This Script (http://www.addthisscript.com/ http://www.addthisscript.com/). Collecting marketing/ad tracking scripts is just one use case for something like this (although it's likely the most easily monetizable). A host script like this can also manage script (e.g. jQuery) dependencies or provide unified APIs (e.g. a common API for web analytics/tracking usage with the ability to plug in which services you want data sent to). Also, for anyone saying companies doing similar things are screwed, I actually think the opposite. Google entering this space validates what others are doing and gets people comfortable with the idea of putting all their scripts/tags in one hosted file. There are so many use cases for something like this and Google won't address them all, so there's plenty of opportunity. Google's primary focus will probably be on making it easier to tie together GA, AdWords conversions and other Google products. EDIT: Fixed link.
- tarr11 14y ago
  Your site appears to be down.
  - bialecki 14y ago
    Oops, misspelled the domain. Thanks for pointing that out.
jsdalton 14y ago
I don't understand what these "tags" are that they are referring to? I guess I really just do not understand what this product does. Anyone care to enlighten me? EDIT: Thanks to everyone who replied, I do have a cleared idea now. This video was particularly helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y So the way I'd describe this to myself to make sense of it is it's a content management system for third-party Javascript code snippets. The focus appears to be on Google services (Analytics, AdSense, etc.) but from the video it appears you can use third party code as well. I find it slightly odd that it's "pitched" to marketers (I'm quite certain none our marketers are going to do regex matching to contextually place snippets on certain pages), so I'm more interested in whether it adds benefits to the developer and/or the end user. Does it slow down or speed up page load times and responsiveness? Is it configurable for more "complex" snippets (both sync and async, etc)? I'm thinking about chartbeat e.g., where you have a snippet that runs at the top of the page to grab a timestamp, and the rest of the snippet runs at the end. If it really does help wrangle and manage all of these code snippets without harming the user experience it might be worth investigating...
- dustincoates 14y ago
  I've been using it for a few weeks and, quite honestly, it's not so good for marketers. Like you mentioned, it's not the easiest to use for someone who doesn't already have the technical skills. Where this is really useful is on the agency side. It can be really difficult to get clients to update their tagging. They have a lot going on and changing a conversion code sometimes gets pushed down the list of things to do. GTM allows that person who knows a bit of the technical background but doesn't have the ability to change the code to go in there and make updates. There are a number of better options--Satellite is one--but of course none of them beat Google on price. If you are reliant on Dart, GA, and AdWords and don't need to work with advanced rules or events, GTM is great. Otherwise, you're likely better off looking elsewhere.
  - jkent 14y ago
    I think the initial implementation can be tricky (we'd recommend a Google Analytics Certified Partner to help), though once that is done, our initial experience is that adding tags is not too difficult. We can help with updating tags (please reach out to your Account Manager), or please reach out to me in my profile.
lickerswill 14y ago
Do lots of cool stuff without bothering your IT department! Now add this code to every page on your site...
- SquareWheel 14y ago
  Well, it's a one-time investment so your marketers/whoever else can make easy changes in the future. Will be useful for SEOs. Personally though I'm concerned by how checking a remote server will add to page load time.
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    If the request is async, it shouldn't cause any problems.
  - jkent 14y ago
    It's a fair concern - we recommend using just Google Tag Manager (synchronous and lightweight) code to fire all your other tags asynchronously. So in most cases, where you call more than one remote code snippet, it could speed it up.
mladenkovacevic 14y ago
It's cool that you can include PPC tags for other platforms in here as well (ie. Bing Ads) although I wonder how many websites will be improperly tagged now that it's in the hands of often technically-challenged marketers.
rfergie 14y ago
Right now I have that feeling you get when you build something you are quite proud of and then someone else comes along and does it far far better for free. C'est la vie I guess. Onto the next thing, whatever that may be
- nostromo 14y ago
  We all know that feeling dude. It's terrible. But, don't give up just because Google entered your space. Sometimes having a team that is dedicated to doing one narrow thing very well is preferable to a mega-corp that is trying to be everything to everyone. You may need to pivot or adjust your stance, but this isn't a death sentence.
- btilly 14y ago
  Google just validated your idea. Don't just assume that they did it better. Look at what they did, steal any ideas that you like from them, and continue on with your own value proposition. Just because it is Google doesn't mean that you're doomed. If it did, then Dropbox would have instantly folded to Google Drive. They didn't. Really this is not you against all of Google. It is you against a small team of people at Google who have some inherent marketing advantages, but who also have a lot of corporate overhead that you don't, and who knows what internal barriers to doing what they want to do. (Which might not even be the right direction.) Is it a competitive threat? Sure. Is it a foregone conclusion? No way!
Joe8Bit 14y ago
There are a couple of companies that are doing this commercially (TagMan, for instance) who might be a little nervous now that Google has entered the space.
TomAnthony 14y ago
Sucks for http://www.brighttag.com/ http://www.brighttag.com/ who do exactly this. Incidentally, they have a great page explaining tags: http://www.brighttag.com/tag-101/ http://www.brighttag.com/tag-101/
typicalrunt 14y ago
I think Google just stepped right onto Tealium's turf, and made it free. Ouch.
ashray 14y ago
Interesting, so as I understand this - it allows 'marketers' to insert javascript code into a website when they want to do something 'new'. (maybe they want to put crazyegg on there, or do something else.. ?) I see where this is trying to help out. But allowing marketers/non-tech-folks to inject copy-pasta javascript into production isn't really a solution I would be comfortable with. Having experienced how small snippets of seemingly inconsequential JS can cause 'ads to fail on IE8' (and this is through DFP, no less!) and thus cause thousands if not millions of dollars of losses makes me nervous about having marketing dudes insert them codes and then go "hey I didn't know it'd break something!". However, on a positive note, I would definitely use it personally to asynchronously load up stuff on my own projects. But on the other hand, I could do that manually myself and actually take care of caching aspects and expires headers, etc. Sorry but I don't see the whole 'speed-up load times' thing as a big bonus unless it's for small projects where you can't afford to deploy on S3/Cloudfront/etc. but on that note, those people won't have 'someone in marketing' wanting to insert their code during runtime. Maybe you should change the marketing angle including explaining the phrase 'tag manager' better ?
- jkent 14y ago
  Hi, I think that for complex sites you have a good point on letting anyone publish tags. Fortunately, it's possible to allow users just to view and edit tags - and not publish them. This leaves the testing and publishing to IT - our testing interface is pretty good - perhaps you could test it :) The speed up is really around asynchronous firing of tags and for that it may not matter where code is hosted. This should help in situations with either synchronous or poorly designed code (in some situations it may not lead to a measurable improvement). You've got a good point - we've got more work to do explaining this topic. Thanks for the feedback!
  - TheMonarch 14y ago
    Just wanted to say that the landing page could do a better job explaining what this tool is. It took me almost 30 minutes before I figured out what this new product did. I didn't know what these "tags" were that kept getting mentioned.
ChrisArchitect 14y ago
I was really scratching my head about what the hell tags were when I saw this yesterday. I clicked around, read pages, mentions of tags all over but no explanation or alternate description of what they were. Terrible unless you're some marketer already using all these. As a web dev, I was mystified (realize now exactly what it is, but just never used the 'tag' word). Seems like a lot of work for a niche space/userbase that is heavily tagging content/etc
TheMonarch 14y ago
Will this help at all if I want to let my marketing dept. publish Doubleclick For Publishers ads flash ads in certain spots on a large-ish website? I would say no, but I'm not sure how DFP works (marketing dept has expressed interest in moving to DFP, but we haven't looked at it yet), if the tags could determine the ad content in a banner spot and mid-article on a particular page, that would be awesome. Otherwise I don't think this will be useful for our company.

72 points by hartard 14y ago

kalid 14y ago

Looks very useful, but they need to update their landing page text. "Tag" is way too overloaded. As a user of Google analytics, etc. I didn't realize what this was. Something like: "Tags are the snippets of code you've had to manually include on your website, like analytics or conversion tracking. Tag manager includes the code automatically, without any website changes."

AminShawki 14y ago

One problem with tag management systems and the whole concept we noticed is the hassle it can be spending a lot of time searching for those tags in your website's code, especially as a marketer. So we created a tool that finds tags in your website's code and generates a report of all tag locations for you. TagInspector.com will save so much time automatically pulling tag locations for you and sending you a report, definitely worth a look. We're looking for any feedback and hopefully this saves you some time and trouble!

bialecki 14y ago

Very interesting. I started a service like this a few months ago called Add This Script (http://www.addthisscript.com/ http://www.addthisscript.com/). Collecting marketing/ad tracking scripts is just one use case for something like this (although it's likely the most easily monetizable). A host script like this can also manage script (e.g. jQuery) dependencies or provide unified APIs (e.g. a common API for web analytics/tracking usage with the ability to plug in which services you want data sent to). Also, for anyone saying companies doing similar things are screwed, I actually think the opposite. Google entering this space validates what others are doing and gets people comfortable with the idea of putting all their scripts/tags in one hosted file. There are so many use cases for something like this and Google won't address them all, so there's plenty of opportunity. Google's primary focus will probably be on making it easier to tie together GA, AdWords conversions and other Google products. EDIT: Fixed link.

tarr11 14y ago
Your site appears to be down.
- bialecki 14y ago
  Oops, misspelled the domain. Thanks for pointing that out.

jsdalton 14y ago

I don't understand what these "tags" are that they are referring to? I guess I really just do not understand what this product does. Anyone care to enlighten me? EDIT: Thanks to everyone who replied, I do have a cleared idea now. This video was particularly helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y So the way I'd describe this to myself to make sense of it is it's a content management system for third-party Javascript code snippets. The focus appears to be on Google services (Analytics, AdSense, etc.) but from the video it appears you can use third party code as well. I find it slightly odd that it's "pitched" to marketers (I'm quite certain none our marketers are going to do regex matching to contextually place snippets on certain pages), so I'm more interested in whether it adds benefits to the developer and/or the end user. Does it slow down or speed up page load times and responsiveness? Is it configurable for more "complex" snippets (both sync and async, etc)? I'm thinking about chartbeat e.g., where you have a snippet that runs at the top of the page to grab a timestamp, and the rest of the snippet runs at the end. If it really does help wrangle and manage all of these code snippets without harming the user experience it might be worth investigating...

dustincoates 14y ago
I've been using it for a few weeks and, quite honestly, it's not so good for marketers. Like you mentioned, it's not the easiest to use for someone who doesn't already have the technical skills. Where this is really useful is on the agency side. It can be really difficult to get clients to update their tagging. They have a lot going on and changing a conversion code sometimes gets pushed down the list of things to do. GTM allows that person who knows a bit of the technical background but doesn't have the ability to change the code to go in there and make updates. There are a number of better options--Satellite is one--but of course none of them beat Google on price. If you are reliant on Dart, GA, and AdWords and don't need to work with advanced rules or events, GTM is great. Otherwise, you're likely better off looking elsewhere.
- jkent 14y ago
  I think the initial implementation can be tricky (we'd recommend a Google Analytics Certified Partner to help), though once that is done, our initial experience is that adding tags is not too difficult. We can help with updating tags (please reach out to your Account Manager), or please reach out to me in my profile.

lickerswill 14y ago

Do lots of cool stuff without bothering your IT department! Now add this code to every page on your site...

SquareWheel 14y ago
Well, it's a one-time investment so your marketers/whoever else can make easy changes in the future. Will be useful for SEOs. Personally though I'm concerned by how checking a remote server will add to page load time.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  If the request is async, it shouldn't cause any problems.
- jkent 14y ago
  It's a fair concern - we recommend using just Google Tag Manager (synchronous and lightweight) code to fire all your other tags asynchronously. So in most cases, where you call more than one remote code snippet, it could speed it up.

mladenkovacevic 14y ago

It's cool that you can include PPC tags for other platforms in here as well (ie. Bing Ads) although I wonder how many websites will be improperly tagged now that it's in the hands of often technically-challenged marketers.

rfergie 14y ago

Right now I have that feeling you get when you build something you are quite proud of and then someone else comes along and does it far far better for free. C'est la vie I guess. Onto the next thing, whatever that may be

nostromo 14y ago
We all know that feeling dude. It's terrible. But, don't give up just because Google entered your space. Sometimes having a team that is dedicated to doing one narrow thing very well is preferable to a mega-corp that is trying to be everything to everyone. You may need to pivot or adjust your stance, but this isn't a death sentence.
btilly 14y ago
Google just validated your idea. Don't just assume that they did it better. Look at what they did, steal any ideas that you like from them, and continue on with your own value proposition. Just because it is Google doesn't mean that you're doomed. If it did, then Dropbox would have instantly folded to Google Drive. They didn't. Really this is not you against all of Google. It is you against a small team of people at Google who have some inherent marketing advantages, but who also have a lot of corporate overhead that you don't, and who knows what internal barriers to doing what they want to do. (Which might not even be the right direction.) Is it a competitive threat? Sure. Is it a foregone conclusion? No way!

Joe8Bit 14y ago

There are a couple of companies that are doing this commercially (TagMan, for instance) who might be a little nervous now that Google has entered the space.

TomAnthony 14y ago

Sucks for http://www.brighttag.com/ http://www.brighttag.com/ who do exactly this. Incidentally, they have a great page explaining tags: http://www.brighttag.com/tag-101/ http://www.brighttag.com/tag-101/

typicalrunt 14y ago

I think Google just stepped right onto Tealium's turf, and made it free. Ouch.

ashray 14y ago

Interesting, so as I understand this - it allows 'marketers' to insert javascript code into a website when they want to do something 'new'. (maybe they want to put crazyegg on there, or do something else.. ?) I see where this is trying to help out. But allowing marketers/non-tech-folks to inject copy-pasta javascript into production isn't really a solution I would be comfortable with. Having experienced how small snippets of seemingly inconsequential JS can cause 'ads to fail on IE8' (and this is through DFP, no less!) and thus cause thousands if not millions of dollars of losses makes me nervous about having marketing dudes insert them codes and then go "hey I didn't know it'd break something!". However, on a positive note, I would definitely use it personally to asynchronously load up stuff on my own projects. But on the other hand, I could do that manually myself and actually take care of caching aspects and expires headers, etc. Sorry but I don't see the whole 'speed-up load times' thing as a big bonus unless it's for small projects where you can't afford to deploy on S3/Cloudfront/etc. but on that note, those people won't have 'someone in marketing' wanting to insert their code during runtime. Maybe you should change the marketing angle including explaining the phrase 'tag manager' better ?

jkent 14y ago
Hi, I think that for complex sites you have a good point on letting anyone publish tags. Fortunately, it's possible to allow users just to view and edit tags - and not publish them. This leaves the testing and publishing to IT - our testing interface is pretty good - perhaps you could test it :) The speed up is really around asynchronous firing of tags and for that it may not matter where code is hosted. This should help in situations with either synchronous or poorly designed code (in some situations it may not lead to a measurable improvement). You've got a good point - we've got more work to do explaining this topic. Thanks for the feedback!
- TheMonarch 14y ago
  Just wanted to say that the landing page could do a better job explaining what this tool is. It took me almost 30 minutes before I figured out what this new product did. I didn't know what these "tags" were that kept getting mentioned.

ChrisArchitect 14y ago

I was really scratching my head about what the hell tags were when I saw this yesterday. I clicked around, read pages, mentions of tags all over but no explanation or alternate description of what they were. Terrible unless you're some marketer already using all these. As a web dev, I was mystified (realize now exactly what it is, but just never used the 'tag' word). Seems like a lot of work for a niche space/userbase that is heavily tagging content/etc

TheMonarch 14y ago

Will this help at all if I want to let my marketing dept. publish Doubleclick For Publishers ads flash ads in certain spots on a large-ish website? I would say no, but I'm not sure how DFP works (marketing dept has expressed interest in moving to DFP, but we haven't looked at it yet), if the tags could determine the ad content in a banner spot and mid-article on a particular page, that would be awesome. Otherwise I don't think this will be useful for our company.