Google announces free inclusion tag solution – Google Tag Manger

So for the last six months or so, I’ve been working on a number of solutions related to Inclusion Tags to improve de-duplication, reporting accuracy and increase efficiency relating to tracking over a number of solutions including; Qubit – OpenTag, Datalicious – Supertag and GTM (Google Tag Manager beta) I have also used Tagman in the past, and have been exposed to some of the MAP Totaltag team’s work in the US.

Today Google have announced their Tag Manager solution publicly, and I thought that I would share some of the recent experience that we have had with it in Beta.

These platforms all have their very unique specifications, however, the opportunity to participate in the Beta with GTM has given us plenty of opportunity to experiment over recent weeks with what the capabilities of the new platform are.

In my opinion, GTM will certainly shake up the market from a number of angles:

• I anticipate that it will offer full integration with Google Analytics & DFA in the future
• Base cost – It’s free – and most other solutions (with the exception of OpenTag) are paid solutions – even OpenTag has a cost for high volume users.
• On Going Price – There is no per impression (CPM) cost
• Swift Development Cycle – It will be continued to be developed to include new functionality for a number of leading reporting platforms (Eg. Omniture) – It has launched with the below (all Google) tag templates as standard:
• Versatility – A bit of a hack that we played with while we had access to the tool in beta was setting up multiple tags to load within a page – it didn’t work for all elements, however, one can experiment to use the inclusion tag to call in additional code through the Asynchronous Inclusion tag.
• The security, integrity and validity of data should be improved through loading through any inclusion tag. As is well documented – it is easy for anyone to destroy your Google Analytics data by including your GA UI in their own website – the fix is pretty simple through using filters correctly in GA, but the tag solution allows you to chose to fire individual tags on a per page basis. It would be possible for someone to take individual conversion codes (Mediamind/Atlas/Adwords/Floodlight) and include them on their page – but it would be quite a hassle.
• Site Speed – As with any Asynchronous inclusion or container tag, site speed should be improved, as should Ux and content load speed.

The only downsides that we experienced using GTM were that when using Clicktale, they require a document.write function within the code – a feature currently blocked (for security grounds we believe). This code is we believe to distinguish between http:// and https:// pages, and we simply removed it, as we only have http:// pages on the Reprise Media Australia website.

Overall experience with GTM was very positive – I will be migrating to it in the coming weeks – I may leave SearchEverywhere on the current QuBit solution as a side by side test of the two platforms going forward, but at the point of launch, I have nothing but positive feedback on the product.

It will be interesting to see if eConsultancy update their inclusion/container tag buyers guide/overview of a few months ago.

/y0z