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Comment by tweetle_beetle | Hacker News Reader

I see GTM being used (abused?) by marketing teams regularly, but I'm really surprised that a bank with its own development team would allow it.

It is really powerful and sometimes incredibly useful in some scenarios (e.g I once built a schema.org metadata system that scraped the pages on the fly for a site with a broken CMS). Simo Ahava does clever things with it.

But from what I can tell, it seems to be a way of avoiding communication between teams, or a political power grab inside bigger companies - a parallel CMS. And the silly bit is that it's normally not doing much more than could be achieved by copy and pasting a few lines of code into a template.

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I was once investigating "partner reporting that our embed loads slowly". The investigation result was something like: their HTML injects JS, which injects another JS, which injects GTM, which injects an SDK, which injects the embed.

Of course it all loads only when the user does not have any adblocking or tracking protections enabled.

Just this week marketing asked me to install another instance of GTM that was controlled by an outside ad agency. That was a hard no.

For clarification, you mean Google Tag Manager?

It's a backdoor way for Google to add more tracking.

Well the clue's in the name. But I'd argue that Google analysing metadata about who's loading what/when through GTM is a lesser evil, when compared to normalising everyone sticking megabytes of mystery scripts on their sites with the tool.

I'd say 'frontdoor' given that the standard first tag to implement is Google Analytics. But I am sure they also generate some data for their own use about the number and types of tags that each site is adding via GTM.

It's a Google backdoor for your team to add more tracking etc.

The important point is that it's a backdoor for marketing (and adtech) teams to get around developer/security requirements. At some point, someone on those teams gets frustrated that their one-line code requests (just load this script! add a gif banner here!) keep falling behind in the backlog. That happens in part because the product team often doesn't care about marketing, and sometimes because developers know that "just one more script!" paves the road to hell. At some point the third-party that's trying to get their business going through your business convinces the marketing team to add GTM, the marketing team says to the dev team "Hey we need GTM to implement THIS script". This time, because the other side has promised them $$$ in terms ROI, the marketing team pushes really hard for it, and eventually a product manager approves the request to get them off their back. The rest, as they say, is history (at retro time, multiple times down the road).

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