Commanders Act Enterprise Tag Manager vs. Google Tag Manager

If you need a single place where you can handle all the third party pixels, this is a well-suited platform. As well as if you want to keep the deployment independent from all other (and more complex) deployments driven by IT. If you need a pixel to be fired not just when the page loads, but based on user actions, you should use the events and that's pretty complex to handle.

Incentivized

Google Tag Manager is well suited when the marketer or marketing team does not work closely with the developers. In this scenario, it means that the marketer can deploy 3rd party tools such as live chat widgets, advertising pixels, and much more themselves in a timely manner. Google Tag Manager may be less relevant in an organization where the marketer is also the developer or has a strong development background, where they can implement the 3rd party tags directly on the site when they need. But even in this instance, there's still great benefit in using Google Tag Manager.

Incentivized

• Creating new pixels is very easy, as well as organizing all of them, handling prioritization between different partners' pixels.
• Defining the perimeters and constraints where the pixels need to be fired is a breeze.
• Deploying the container and keeping track of all the modification is very well done.
• The configuration of the deduplication rule is pretty flexible.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Reports. Tag Commander lacks in term of reports of what's happening. There is an additional module called Attribution Management System that gives you a lot of insights, but more basic reports to understand what has been fired will be useful.
• Support. Tag Commander support is very low responsive. It took several days to have the first feedback and generally, it takes a lot of emails to get what you need.
• Deduplication engine flexibility. The engine is there and it works pretty well, until you have a slightly different need. In that case you need to implement something custom in terms of implementation, reports, etc. A more flexible approach would be useful.

Incentivized

• There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
• Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.

Incentivized

Until a strong case or need arises for enterprise tag management, I cannot see any reason why we would discontinue using Google Tag Manager. Even if we were to switch to a different vendor, we would still likely use Google Tag Manager to manage Google Analytics code and Google AdWords conversion and remarketing pixels

Google Tag Manager is the best tool to centralize everything in one place including marketing, analytics, integration with third party tools for AB testing, cookie management, etc. it includes user's management, debugging features, tag approval process, etc. it also saves time and resources by not relying on developers.

It depends wether you are seeking official support from Google itself, in which case it would be rated very low because it's not their business model, they would rather have you work with one of their Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP). In terms of self-served support, Google offer extensive documentation at https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/, recently revamped training (https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course05/preview), has active forums and user community (https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104865292981489764063) which can typically answer even the most advanced questions.

I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.

Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.

Incentivized

With GTM we are able to integrate GA4 with other platforms we use. We can then send data to GA4 and AdWords and relay that info to our customers. They all work well together and give us a good opportunity to report back to our clients. We haven't used a ton of other products that do what GTM does, so I guess it has a leg up there

Incentivized

• It let us deploy new pixels/fixes to pixels independently from the IT deployment process.
• It let us easily turn on/off and sort the pixel execution based on partners' priority, assuring better data tracking for more important partners.
• It provides out of the box pixel implementation for tons of partners, but really often we need to rewrite the pixel from scratch as they're not up to date.

Incentivized

• GTM has allowed us to show positive ROI for multiple clients via connecting their two websites so that they could see the amount of money advertising generates.
• GTM has also shown a positive ROI from an internal perspective as we can use templates to immediately upload our standard, customized event tracking which saves hours of testing and configuration.
• GTM's lack of error catching features has caused more time and individual testing but the improved preview feature has helped save time.

Incentivized