Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform vs. Google Tag Manager

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform is well suited for organisations that have extensive PII data with attributes & consumer behaviors. Also, who wants to run omnichannel customer acquisition and focus on middle- or low-funch campaigns? Also, having multiple digital assets (i.e., website, mobile application, CRM, SMS campaign channels, etc).

Incentivized

Google Tag Manager is well suited when the marketer or marketing team does not work closely with the developers. In this scenario, it means that the marketer can deploy 3rd party tools such as live chat widgets, advertising pixels, and much more themselves in a timely manner. Google Tag Manager may be less relevant in an organization where the marketer is also the developer or has a strong development background, where they can implement the 3rd party tags directly on the site when they need. But even in this instance, there's still great benefit in using Google Tag Manager.

Incentivized

• Real time segmentation and profiling on high volume of customer data
• Integration of various customer data sources, ranging from CRM, Web Analytics, EDL and other custom sources
• Data governance of customer data in the platform, down to attribute based access controls
• Activation across paid media, marketing automation and experience optimization platforms
• Easy to use interface for marketers

Incentivized

• Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
• In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
• Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
• Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.

Incentivized

• Some features that are not yet released to all customers are necessary to manage cases like device sharing
• The methodology of how data is stored and manage is relatively unique and requires some ramp-up to fully understand
• There are some areas, like deduplication, where the platform doesn't provide the flexibility one would expect

Incentivized

• There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
• Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.

Incentivized

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform quickly becomes a must-have once you are through the "build it" phase. Direct integration with a wide variety of disparate systems makes it a difficult proposition to remove once users are trained in its various systems and fully bought into the strategy behind its use. Support for a wide range of teams is helpful in adoption and continued use of Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform - everyone in data engineering, martech, frontend marketing can find a use case to pursue.

Incentivized

Until a strong case or need arises for enterprise tag management, I cannot see any reason why we would discontinue using Google Tag Manager. Even if we were to switch to a different vendor, we would still likely use Google Tag Manager to manage Google Analytics code and Google AdWords conversion and remarketing pixels

Activation - great Segmentation - in UI, there should be the possibility of writing advanced code Tags. Both Mobile and Desktop Data Ingestion - might be pain in the ass. Changing one customer attribute is time-consuming. It should be some super admin or some feature. One user can change some customers' attributes easily. Data Transformation - Maybe there are some modules for that in AJO?

Incentivized

Google Tag Manager is the best tool to centralize everything in one place including marketing, analytics, integration with third party tools for AB testing, cookie management, etc. it includes user's management, debugging features, tag approval process, etc. it also saves time and resources by not relying on developers.

It depends wether you are seeking official support from Google itself, in which case it would be rated very low because it's not their business model, they would rather have you work with one of their Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP). In terms of self-served support, Google offer extensive documentation at https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/, recently revamped training (https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course05/preview), has active forums and user community (https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104865292981489764063) which can typically answer even the most advanced questions.

I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.

Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.

Incentivized

Adobe CDP is a very capable product that offers all of the features that its competitors offer and more. The only differences can be noticed while connecting with other external tools. Adobe can help easily connect with tools within its ecosystem: Analytics/Marketo/Target, etc.

Incentivized

With GTM we are able to integrate GA4 with other platforms we use. We can then send data to GA4 and AdWords and relay that info to our customers. They all work well together and give us a good opportunity to report back to our clients. We haven't used a ton of other products that do what GTM does, so I guess it has a leg up there

Incentivized

• it has allowed us to gain more insights into our profiles
• we have been able to manage our schemas with ease

Incentivized

• GTM has allowed us to show positive ROI for multiple clients via connecting their two websites so that they could see the amount of money advertising generates.
• GTM has also shown a positive ROI from an internal perspective as we can use templates to immediately upload our standard, customized event tracking which saves hours of testing and configuration.
• GTM's lack of error catching features has caused more time and individual testing but the improved preview feature has helped save time.

Incentivized