Google Tag Manager (GTM) is one of the most empowering things to happen to the analytics community. GTM takes the much of the onus off of a developers when it comes to custom analytics implementations. No longer are we long complicated code in big scary JavaScript files. Now we write tags in GTM’s interface. And GTM has a built in testing environment. Now there’s less of a risk I’ll take down an entire website because I forget to add a comma between values in an array. It’s liberating.
But liberation is not ease. When I first encountered GTM, I thought it would now be easy for everyone to manage their own analytics. It’s true, GTM makes it easier to install and do custom analytics. But “easier” is not synonymous “cake-walk.” GTM is still very much an analytics tool. It requires analytics thoughts. And yes, you still may need to do some coding. It takes planning. It still takes an understanding of how code works. You need to learn its syntax. You need to know its secrets. And some understanding of the DOM. And its most powerful feature, the data layer, is going to require some amount of coding.
Developers, rejoice that GTM has given analysts more power. But don’t disappear. We still need you.