Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a free tag management system that lets marketing and analytics tags be added, edited and removed through a web interface rather than by editing site code, with triggers, variables, versioning, preview mode and a server-side container option.

Being free is what made it the default and it is genuinely free rather than free-with-limits for most users, which is why the tag management category is effectively Google Tag Manager plus a set of products explaining what they do differently.

Removing the developer from the loop is the actual value and the honest description of the risk. A marketer can deploy a tracking tag in minutes without waiting for a release, and a marketer can also deploy a badly written tag that slows every page or leaks data, because the same permission covers both.

Server-side tagging is the more consequential recent capability, moving tag execution off the browser to a container the organisation controls, which improves page performance and gives back a measure of data collection that browser privacy controls have taken away. Tag Manager is free, with a 360 version sold inside Google Marketing Platform. Alongside the core engine, Google Tag Manager covers templates for common vendors, custom HTML and JavaScript tags, mobile app containers and tag Manager 360 within Google Marketing Platform, which is the practical surface a team works with day to day.