Comment by jsdalton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsdalton | Hacker News Reader

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...

> I find it slightly odd that it's "pitched" to marketers

Marketers are who typically need to tag a page with -- Google Analytics, AdWords/AdRoll/Retargeter and a half dozen other remarketing services' tags, Quantcast/Compete, KissMetrics/MixPanel, Omniture or other ad trackers... the list of tags for tracking visitors gets quite large just to effectively create and track marketing results.

This isn't a generic JavaScript delivery platform. You wouldn't put AdSense or Facebook Like code in it, as some suggested, as that has to be placed where you want the output to be. "Tags" refers to JS code that tags visitors for marketing purposes; no output.

If you are non-coder/technical and use soem analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics), this is for you.

Normally, you grab the tracking codes from Google Analytics and hand that to the developer/webmaster to include in the site.

With this, you create a tag in Tag Manager for your Analytics code snippet and hand them off to your webmaster. If there are changes to your analytics code, you can change it yourself using Tag Manager and no need to wait for your webmaster to do it.

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.

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 information those tags have generated. But even if that market doesn't pan out, it extends Google's knowledge of who is reading what, where, which of course is the flip side of search: not just spidering content and seeing how it relates to itself via links, but observing users and seeing how they relate to content. This is valuable data, and whatever you spend on "free" tooling is probably justified.

Smart.

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.

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

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.

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.

I also think the site doesn't explain very well the idea. Take a look to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y should be easier to understand.

I've been using it for a few weeks and, quite honestly, it's not so good for marketers. Like you mentioned, it's not the easiest to use for someone who doesn't already have the technical skills.

Where this is really useful is on the agency side. It can be really difficult to get clients to update their tagging. They have a lot going on and changing a conversion code sometimes gets pushed down the list of things to do. GTM allows that person who knows a bit of the technical background but doesn't have the ability to change the code to go in there and make updates.

There are a number of better options--Satellite is one--but of course none of them beat Google on price. If you are reliant on Dart, GA, and AdWords and don't need to work with advanced rules or events, GTM is great. Otherwise, you're likely better off looking elsewhere.

I think the initial implementation can be tricky (we'd recommend a Google Analytics Certified Partner to help), though once that is done, our initial experience is that adding tags is not too difficult.

We can help with updating tags (please reach out to your Account Manager), or please reach out to me in my profile.

Took me a while to work it out too. Really weirdly presented given the audience.

It is primarily talking about Javascript snippets. Google Analytics snippet, Facebook Like button snippet etc.

Just to add to the discussion, the tag management area is decently niche but really important when you need it aka it can speed up your site significantly, allow you to not bother or need developers as much, and dedup marketing spends across different networks. All things that mean A LOT to marketers of large sites with large spends.

The title here originally appended "(Javascript snippets)" but I guess the mods removed it?

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