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Comment by jkent | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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