
Google Tag Manager - hartard
http://www.google.com/tagmanager/
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jsdalton
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>

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...

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jkent
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.

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ashray
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 :)

~~~
jkent
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.

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rfergie
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

~~~
btilly
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!

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kalid
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."

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AminShawki
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!

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

~~~
SquareWheel
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.

~~~
jkent
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.

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ashray
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
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
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.

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Joe8Bit
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.

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TomAnthony
Sucks for <http://www.brighttag.com/> who do exactly this.

Incidentally, they have a great page explaining tags:

<http://www.brighttag.com/tag-101/>

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bialecki
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.

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tarr11
Your site appears to be down.

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bialecki
Oops, misspelled the domain. Thanks for pointing that out.

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mladenkovacevic
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.

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TheMonarch
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.

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ChrisArchitect
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

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

