Cut maintenance costs with standard Google Tag Manager tracking stack

It's hard to imagine any serious online business without any tracking. It is not only important for understanding what drive sales and how users interacts with the business offer, but it is a requirement for any successful advertising campaign. Without tracking advertising platforms cannot scale reach of ads and tune targeting.

At the same time with recent legal, technical, and cultural evolvements around privacy and malicious tracking practises the tracking technical stack become more complex:

• Consent Management Platforms

• Tag Managers

• Server-side tagging

• Conversions API

• Product catalogs and feeds

As a result, choosing right tracking solution becomes a strategic, long term decision that may speed up or jeopardise business growth.

Learn why Google Tag Manager is one of the best long-term investments in terms of tracking stack.

It's an industry standard and extensive ecosystem

Google Tag Manager and Google Tag (gtag) is present on the market since 2012 and according to surveys quoted by Wikipedia it has 99.7% market share (link) among tag managers.

It is a very mature and battle-tested system backed and supported by biggest tech companies. If any new technology emerges around tracking solutions it is guaranteed it will quickly become available for the Google Tag Manager.

At the same time it's popularity lead to creation of a new rich ecosystem. It means that every part of the tracking lifecycle is covered by a extensive variety of alternative, competitive and complementary tools and services.

No vendor lock-in

Thanks to the vibrant ecosystem there is no risk of vendor lock-in situation where eCommerce owners are put in a difficult position of not having enough options and being forced to use single vendor if they want to avoid costly migrations.

The business owners position is ensured with modular architecture of Google Tag Manager based solutions. The whole tracking setup is composed from individual components:

• DataLayer implementation (tracking plugin)

• Consent Mode (Consent Management Platform)

• Tag Manager templates and tags

• sGTM hosting

Each of those components can be easily replaced without major disruption to the whole tracking system and can include solutions from different vendors.

Experts availability and customizations

The vibrant ecosystem is not just about tools and products. It's also about easy access to tracking specialists and educational materials like step-by-step guides and explanatory videos.

Those experts and guides thrive because Google Tag Manager is not only the industry-standard, but also a very customizable solution.

What to watch out for

Picking the modular and flexible tool like Google Tag Manager bring all the benefits listed above, but also comes with possible risks.

Although Google documentation and standards are extensive they are not always covering all possible use-cases. This is where each vendor can implement missing features differently, so switching between tools require some low-level knowledge.

The same applies to freelancers and agencies, frequently changing implementation specialists can lead to accumulating technical debt as each new expert may bring slightly different approach like naming conventions etc.