Google Tag Manager
google.comI 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
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...
> I find it slightly odd that it's "pitched" to marketers
Marketers are who typically need to tag a page with -- Google Analytics, AdWords/AdRoll/Retargeter and a half dozen other remarketing services' tags, Quantcast/Compete, KissMetrics/MixPanel, Omniture or other ad trackers... the list of tags for tracking visitors gets quite large just to effectively create and track marketing results.
This isn't a generic JavaScript delivery platform. You wouldn't put AdSense or Facebook Like code in it, as some suggested, as that has to be placed where you want the output to be. "Tags" refers to JS code that tags visitors for marketing purposes; no output.
If you are non-coder/technical and use soem analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics), this is for you.
Normally, you grab the tracking codes from Google Analytics and hand that to the developer/webmaster to include in the site.
With this, you create a tag in Tag Manager for your Analytics code snippet and hand them off to your webmaster. If there are changes to your analytics code, you can change it yourself using Tag Manager and no need to wait for your webmaster to do it.
Hi
I manage this product here at Google (for the USA).
We think that it should speed up site loading (in most cases) by asynchronously wrapping your other synchronous and asynchronous JavaScript tags.
We've included built in templates for our own tags at first though we will be introducing easier support for third-party tags soon (templating). At the moment you can do this by adding custom img or Javascript tags in the interface.
This product has most impact where you want to add/remove multiple affiliate tracking or remarketing tags (for instance), across your whole site quickly and easily.
Hope that helps.
Ha, this product is very clever. You are effectively bootstrapping yourself into arbitrary page execution environments, and giving (non-technical) users the ability to parameterize and manipulate that environment.
The joys of indirection.
In trade for building the tooling around managing that parameterization, Google gets...eyes. Eyes that need to manipulate tags are eyes that need to buy tags, consume the information those tags have generated. But even if that market doesn't pan out, it extends Google's knowledge of who is reading what, where, which of course is the flip side of search: not just spidering content and seeing how it relates to itself via links, but observing users and seeing how they relate to content. This is valuable data, and whatever you spend on "free" tooling is probably justified.
Smart.
Under the Google Tag Manager Terms of Service, the account holder owns the data. We don't do anything with that data without your consent and Google Tag Manager collects very little data itself - it's cookie-less. I hope that helps!
Then I guess I'm confused as to what Google's angle is here. I presume there's at least a small team of 6-figure salaried programmers behind this, so what justifies the expense?
To compete in the growing Tag Management Market. Adobe offers a Tag Management service and there are many other paid premium versions. Tag Management is a tool for digital marketers to deploy agile javascript code in a technical environment where site builds are not agile.
Tagging is friction on Ad campaigns. Remove that friction and marketers can run more/better campaigns, thus spending more money with Google.
Question for your JS folks: How are they going to handle document.write calls in third party or even 1st party tags ? Those are blocking by nature and trying to load them up asynchronously will ruin the page. I know there are a few document.write overrides but I'm interested in seeing how they would approach this :)
Good question. Google Tag Manager is about improving marketing and tracking tag/pixel performance. These scripts shouldn't do document.write too much.
We don't recommend putting tags in Google Tag Manager that manipulate on-screen elements due to the asynchronous behaviour.
I'm the founder of UberTags, which is a similar solution. We automatically transform doc.writes to appends to handle async. I'm assuming GTM does something similar.
I also think the site doesn't explain very well the idea. Take a look to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y should be easier to understand.
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.
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.
Took me a while to work it out too. Really weirdly presented given the audience.
It is primarily talking about Javascript snippets. Google Analytics snippet, Facebook Like button snippet etc.
Just to add to the discussion, the tag management area is decently niche but really important when you need it aka it can speed up your site significantly, allow you to not bother or need developers as much, and dedup marketing spends across different networks. All things that mean A LOT to marketers of large sites with large spends.
The title here originally appended "(Javascript snippets)" but I guess the mods removed it?
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
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!
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.
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."
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!
Do lots of cool stuff without bothering your IT department! Now add this code to every page on your site...
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.
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.
If the request is async, it shouldn't cause any problems.
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 ?
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!
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.
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.
Sucks for http://www.brighttag.com/ who do exactly this.
Incidentally, they have a great page explaining tags:
Very interesting. I started a service like this a few months ago called Add This Script (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.
Your site appears to be down.
Oops, misspelled the domain. Thanks for pointing that out.
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.
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.
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
I think Google just stepped right onto Tealium's turf, and made it free. Ouch.