I don't understand what these "tags" are that they are referring to? I guess I really just do not understand what this product does. Anyone care to enlighten me?<p>EDIT: Thanks to everyone who replied, I do have a cleared idea now. This video was particularly helpful: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y</a><p>So the way I'd describe this to myself to make sense of it is it's a content management system for third-party Javascript code snippets. The focus appears to be on Google services (Analytics, AdSense, etc.) but from the video it appears you can use third party code as well.<p>I find it slightly odd that it's "pitched" to marketers (I'm quite certain none our marketers are going to do regex matching to contextually place snippets on certain pages), so I'm more interested in whether it adds benefits to the developer and/or the end user.<p>Does it slow down or speed up page load times and responsiveness? Is it configurable for more "complex" snippets (both sync and async, etc)? I'm thinking about chartbeat e.g., where you have a snippet that runs at the top of the page to grab a timestamp, and the rest of the snippet runs at the end.<p>If it really does help wrangle and manage all of these code snippets without harming the user experience it might be worth investigating...
Right now I have that feeling you get when you build something you are quite proud of and then someone else comes along and does it far far better for free.<p>C'est la vie I guess. Onto the next thing, whatever that may be
Looks very useful, but they need to update their landing page text. "Tag" is way too overloaded. As a user of Google analytics, etc. I didn't realize what this was. Something like:<p>"Tags are the snippets of code you've had to manually include on your website, like analytics or conversion tracking. Tag manager includes the code automatically, without any website changes."
One problem with tag management systems and the whole concept we noticed is the hassle it can be spending a lot of time searching for those tags in your website's code, especially as a marketer. So we created a tool that finds tags in your website's code and generates a report of all tag locations for you. TagInspector.com will save so much time automatically pulling tag locations for you and sending you a report, definitely worth a look. We're looking for any feedback and hopefully this saves you some time and trouble!
Interesting, so as I understand this - it allows 'marketers' to insert javascript code into a website when they want to do something 'new'. (maybe they want to put crazyegg on there, or do something else.. ?)<p>I see where this is trying to help out. But allowing marketers/non-tech-folks to inject copy-pasta javascript into production isn't really a solution I would be comfortable with. Having experienced how small snippets of seemingly inconsequential JS can cause 'ads to fail on IE8' (and this is through DFP, no less!) and thus cause thousands if not millions of dollars of losses makes me nervous about having marketing dudes insert them codes and then go "hey I didn't know it'd break something!".<p>However, on a positive note, I would definitely use it personally to asynchronously load up stuff on my own projects. But on the other hand, I could do that manually myself and actually take care of caching aspects and expires headers, etc.<p>Sorry but I don't see the whole 'speed-up load times' thing as a big bonus unless it's for small projects where you can't afford to deploy on S3/Cloudfront/etc. but on that note, those people won't have 'someone in marketing' wanting to insert their code during runtime.<p>Maybe you should change the marketing angle including explaining the phrase 'tag manager' better ?
There are a couple of companies that are doing this commercially (TagMan, for instance) who might be a little nervous now that Google has entered the space.
Sucks for <a href="http://www.brighttag.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brighttag.com/</a> who do exactly this.<p>Incidentally, they have a great page explaining tags:<p><a href="http://www.brighttag.com/tag-101/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brighttag.com/tag-101/</a>
Very interesting. I started a service like this a few months ago called Add This Script (<a href="http://www.addthisscript.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.addthisscript.com/</a>).<p>Collecting marketing/ad tracking scripts is just one use case for something like this (although it's likely the most easily monetizable). A host script like this can also manage script (e.g. jQuery) dependencies or provide unified APIs (e.g. a common API for web analytics/tracking usage with the ability to plug in which services you want data sent to).<p>Also, for anyone saying companies doing similar things are screwed, I actually think the opposite. Google entering this space validates what others are doing and gets people comfortable with the idea of putting all their scripts/tags in one hosted file. There are so many use cases for something like this and Google won't address them all, so there's plenty of opportunity. Google's primary focus will probably be on making it easier to tie together GA, AdWords conversions and other Google products.<p>EDIT: Fixed link.
It's cool that you can include PPC tags for other platforms in here as well (ie. Bing Ads) although I wonder how many websites will be improperly tagged now that it's in the hands of often technically-challenged marketers.
Will this help at all if I want to let my marketing dept. publish Doubleclick For Publishers ads flash ads in certain spots on a large-ish website? I would say no, but I'm not sure how DFP works (marketing dept has expressed interest in moving to DFP, but we haven't looked at it yet), if the tags could determine the ad content in a banner spot and mid-article on a particular page, that would be awesome. Otherwise I don't think this will be useful for our company.
I was really scratching my head about what the hell tags were when I saw this yesterday. I clicked around, read pages, mentions of tags all over but no explanation or alternate description of what they were. Terrible unless you're some marketer already using all these. As a web dev, I was mystified (realize now exactly what it is, but just never used the 'tag' word).
Seems like a lot of work for a niche space/userbase that is heavily tagging content/etc