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Google Tag Manager

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Re: Google Tag Manager

#31

Post by javajosh »

jkent wrote: post #30
javajosh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informatio…

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?

Re: Google Tag Manager

#32

Post by darien »

javajosh wrote: post #31
jkent wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Google Tag Manager

#33

Post by 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 ?

Re: Google Tag Manager

#34

Post by ashray »

jkent wrote: post #24
jsdalton wrote: post #2

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…

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 t…

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 :)

Re: Google Tag Manager

#35

Post by jkent »

ashray wrote: post #33

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 sni…

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!

Re: Google Tag Manager

#36

Post by jkent »

ashray wrote: post #34
jkent wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: Google Tag Manager

#37

Post by 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

Re: Google Tag Manager

#38

Post by jeremybieger »

ashray wrote: post #34
jkent wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 :)

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.

Re: Google Tag Manager

#39

Post by enomar »

javajosh wrote: post #31
jkent wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tagging is friction on Ad campaigns. Remove that friction and marketers can run more/better campaigns, thus spending more money with Google.

Re: Google Tag Manager

#40

Post by 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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