
Google Optimize: Google’s New A/B Testing Product - fabiolamm
http://blog.convert.com/google-optimize-googles-new-ab-testing-product.html
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shostack
Engineers I know who I've worked with on GTM implementations are not big fans.
It offers the ability to execute arbitrary JS on your site, does not live in
our main repo (unless we export a container and store its JSON there), and
there doesn't seem to be any good way to run integration tests on code within
GTM itself (obviously you can run tests that observe the output of GTM).

As a marketer, it has indeed enabled me to launch tags and such without an
engineer, but in many cases I'd actually prefer to have this live in our code
base so it isn't broken by accident by someone who had no idea that some of
what they were working on touched a container they had no visibility into.

All of this to say that I get worried when looking at more involved A/B tests
that touch pieces of ones product. Sure it might be fine for superficial
front-end design tweaks, but testing anything deeper scares me.

Also, random aside, but the author might wish to get some proofing of their
article. There's a ton of typos and indicators of a non-native English speaker
writing this and made for a more difficult reading experience.

~~~
enomar
If you want to integrate GTM with your internal source control system, they
have a programmatic API that you can tie into your build process:

[https://developers.google.com/tag-
manager/api/v1/](https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/api/v1/)

And if you want to lock down what kinds tags can run on your site, they have a
nice whitelisting/blacklisting system that lets you block capabilities (e.g.
customScripts to block arbitrary JS):

[https://developers.google.com/tag-
manager/devguide?hl=en#res...](https://developers.google.com/tag-
manager/devguide?hl=en#restricting-tag-deployment)

~~~
shostack
Thanks for those links. Am I missing something in them or would using managing
GTM programmatically via their API kind of defeat the entire purpose of giving
business users like myself the ability to add/manage tags?

Seems like a case where there's no good way to have our cake and eat it too in
terms of usability for business users and testing/security for our engineers.

