What are you missing for a better GTM organization?
Dear Data-Traveller, please note that this is a Linkedin-Remix.
I posted this content already on Linkedin in March 2022, but I want to make sure it doesn´t get lost in the social network abyss.
For your accessibility-experience and also for our own content backup, we repost the original text here.
Have a look, leave a like if you like it, and join the conversation in the comments if this sparks a thought!
Plain Text:
Can we imagine a world without tag management setups?
I have to admit it’s pretty hard. But tag management setups have a severe flaw that people rarely talk about.
Sure, if you only send data to 1-2 destinations, it’s no problem to do this without a tag management system but this today is an edge case.
The tag management helps us to collect similar data in an abstract way and then, based on individual triggers, send it out to multiple sources. By that, it saves us implementation time, and it creates a single place where all tracking scripts can be found that are sending data out. That sounds great!
The major flaw of all tag management systems is that they are built for small setups. All instruction videos and tutorials are always about setting up tags or specific use cases. But most setups I see are struggling because of size.
And it starts already with 10-20 tags.
Let’s take the most used tag management: the Google Tag Manager. For scaling, it’s missing essential parts:
– organization assets like folder structure (not their weird folder implementation) or tags
– full-size documentation within tags (not the hidden notes feature – which is excellent, by the way, when you have found it)
– config as code (my gut tells me that it would solve some problems, but not entirely sure about it)
– more accessible ways to abstract, modularize and refactor implementations (yes, zones are a shy way to start with that)
– build-in monitoring (Mark Edmondson and Simo Ahava wrote a great post on how to achieve it yourself – but why isn’t monitoring a first-class feature).
It’s tough to manage mid-large size tag management setups. This is a topic I will investigate more in the future to see how we can solve this.
The poll with results:
