EDIT: Thanks to everyone who replied, I do have a cleared idea now. This video was particularly helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvbFpeZ11Y
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.
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.
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.
If it really does help wrangle and manage all of these code snippets without harming the user experience it might be worth investigating...
Marketers are who typically need to tag a page with -- Google Analytics, AdWords/AdRoll/Retargeter and a half dozen other remarketing services' tags, Quantcast/Compete, KissMetrics/MixPanel, Omniture or other ad trackers... the list of tags for tracking visitors gets quite large just to effectively create and track marketing results.
This isn't a generic JavaScript delivery platform. You wouldn't put AdSense or Facebook Like code in it, as some suggested, as that has to be placed where you want the output to be. "Tags" refers to JS code that tags visitors for marketing purposes; no output.
Normally, you grab the tracking codes from Google Analytics and hand that to the developer/webmaster to include in the site.
With this, you create a tag in Tag Manager for your Analytics code snippet and hand them off to your webmaster. If there are changes to your analytics code, you can change it yourself using Tag Manager and no need to wait for your webmaster to do it.
I manage this product here at Google (for the USA).
We think that it should speed up site loading (in most cases) by asynchronously wrapping your other synchronous and asynchronous JavaScript tags.
We've included built in templates for our own tags at first though we will be introducing easier support for third-party tags soon (templating). At the moment you can do this by adding custom img or Javascript tags in the interface.
This product has most impact where you want to add/remove multiple affiliate tracking or remarketing tags (for instance), across your whole site quickly and easily.
Hope that helps.
The joys of indirection.
In trade for building the tooling around managing that parameterization, Google gets...eyes. Eyes that need to manipulate tags are eyes that need to buy tags, consume the information those tags have generated. But even if that market doesn't pan out, it extends Google's knowledge of who is reading what, where, which of course is the flip side of search: not just spidering content and seeing how it relates to itself via links, but observing users and seeing how they relate to content. This is valuable data, and whatever you spend on "free" tooling is probably justified.
Smart.
Where this is really useful is on the agency side. It can be really difficult to get clients to update their tagging. They have a lot going on and changing a conversion code sometimes gets pushed down the list of things to do. GTM allows that person who knows a bit of the technical background but doesn't have the ability to change the code to go in there and make updates.
There are a number of better options--Satellite is one--but of course none of them beat Google on price. If you are reliant on Dart, GA, and AdWords and don't need to work with advanced rules or events, GTM is great. Otherwise, you're likely better off looking elsewhere.
We can help with updating tags (please reach out to your Account Manager), or please reach out to me in my profile.
It is primarily talking about Javascript snippets. Google Analytics snippet, Facebook Like button snippet etc.
C'est la vie I guess. Onto the next thing, whatever that may be
Just because it is Google doesn't mean that you're doomed. If it did, then Dropbox would have instantly folded to Google Drive. They didn't.
Really this is not you against all of Google. It is you against a small team of people at Google who have some inherent marketing advantages, but who also have a lot of corporate overhead that you don't, and who knows what internal barriers to doing what they want to do. (Which might not even be the right direction.)
Is it a competitive threat? Sure. Is it a foregone conclusion? No way!
"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."
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!".
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.
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.
Maybe you should change the marketing angle including explaining the phrase 'tag manager' better ?
I think that for complex sites you have a good point on letting anyone publish tags. Fortunately, it's possible to allow users just to view and edit tags - and not publish them. This leaves the testing and publishing to IT - our testing interface is pretty good - perhaps you could test it :)
The speed up is really around asynchronous firing of tags and for that it may not matter where code is hosted. This should help in situations with either synchronous or poorly designed code (in some situations it may not lead to a measurable improvement).
You've got a good point - we've got more work to do explaining this topic. Thanks for the feedback!
Incidentally, they have a great page explaining tags:
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).
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.
EDIT: Fixed link.
