Google continues to amaze me with their ability to find new ways to harvest new data. This is genius.

http://www.google.com/tagmanager/features.html

and spotting someone elses product, copying it, and giving it away for free

That too... I just would have thought Google would have figured this out sooner, since the data harvesting opportunities are substantial.

Who is going to implement this with the current description? I had to read that page several times before I could even get a vague idea of what the hell they were talking about. "Tags"? que?

So they're going to take all your code snippets and manage them? I don't see how that would benefit most of us who make our own sites. They must be going for the corporate behemoth market.

Quote from: bill on October 11, 2012, 01:55:22 AM
Who is going to implement this with the current description? I had to read that page several times before I could even get a vague idea of what the hell they were talking about. "Tags"? que?

Glad I wasn't the only one. I had to find a video to watch to get a clearer picture of what they were banging on about.

I suspect this is really aimed at agencies, or really large clients. It's a way of making them all just a little bit more dependent on G

QuoteWho is going to implement this with the current description? I had to read that page several times before I could even get a vague idea of what the hell they were talking about. "Tags"? que?

Okay, I thought it was just me too, but I've been "trained up" on this recently since various "tag management" providers have been pitching my wife. I had no idea what she was talking about. In webspeak, to me tags are, well, tags (h1, img) and Javascript snippets are, uh snippets. I had the audacity to tell her that these people were making things confusing and they should just use the right terminology, not realizing that a month later, Google would side with them and make my rant obsolete.

So I think Google chose that wording because this is what the marketing departments and agencies with little technical know-how use and "tag management" is apparently a fairly big deal these days. In my wife's case, they might be running a lot of different campaigns and they try to segment everything - each print ad/paper letter  every print ad gets its own response phone number and they have all sorts of different snippets that end up on landing pages and, apparently, "tag management" is a huge headache for them.

So this is the audience Google is targeting.

Pretty grim reading if you're an affiliate.

The de facto solution for merchants (at least in the UK) is usually by http://www.tagman.com - they certainly won't like this news 

Whenever i've been aware of a merchant that has started to use tag management software it invariably means the affliate program will suffer because the tag software will start attributing sales across a multitude of different media. Affiliate revenue tends to suffer a fair bit due to this.

A greater take up of this type of software across merchants makes me shudder. Thanks a bunch Google!

I wouldn't worry - if a company or agency didn't know what a tag was previously (even if they call it something different) they won't understand it well enough to actually run attribution off it anyway.

Where we have successfully tagged every channel and got attribution running properly(ish) btw, affiliates split into two camps, the goalhangers (voucher codes etc) are tending to be offered less or occasionally dropped (but if we cull for simplicity we always leave one because people will hunt down a code one way or another - we just send all traffic one way and do a deal we're both happy with), but affiliates driving new traffic (price comparison is obviously a biggie for several clients, but also several cashback sites work really well) are getting better deals because we can see they're driving new traffic. Guess how good the news is depends where on that line you sit

SEOmoz has an article that outlines tags much better than what I could glean from Google itself:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-tag-management

The issue has always been to do with speed.

Speed of implementation by the developers of a site.

Speed of the site itself.

I think that Google said the average number of tags in place - for tag, read tracking script, mainly javascript was 14.

Those might include :

Google Analytics
Retargeting
Affiliate Network A
Affiliate Network B
Google Adwords Conversion
Doubleclick
Compete

Now, with one overall container tag, you can set up other tags that fire when rules are in place, so the code is cleaner.

It might be if the target url is from affiliate network A then fire conversion pixel C rather than every pixel from every network firing.

Dependency on Google vs. dependency on a company like Tagman. One is cheaper.

This is not about retargeting or remarketing, I think many people are confused by it. Retargeting could be one of the tags you put in place.

Think of it as a container to put everything else into..... a great big <div>

>>Speed of the site itself.

That's what now has me thinking about it. If it does asynchronous loading and also offloads several requests with a single request to the tag manager, it should speed up load times.