The saying goes, an image is worth a 1000 words, and mine sparked an interesting conversation on Google+ between myself and two of the industry’s respected minds – Simo Ahava and Stephane Hamel. Essentially, I was asked by Simo to back up my numbers – a fair question. So here is my reply…

As +Stéphane Hamel says in his last comment, “this type of info is qualitative data expressed as a quantitative value, anecdotal at best, or based on a very limited data set.”

The numbers I show in my slide are based solely on my own experience of client implementations. That is, when my company has been hired to do the setup of Google Analytics – its a mix of a clean slate and fixing an existing bad/basic setups.

The explanation…

-50% improvement when implementing directly means…

no third-party development agency is involved. Without GTM this would involve producing documentation for each custom tracking code required. The internal web team then implements it. With GTM, this becomes a one-time request for the inclusion of the GTM code snippet, and then I pick it up form there – all within the GTM.*

-90% improvement when when working with a dev agency

is the same as above except this time my communication is via a third-party web dev agency. That generally means without GTM a lot more paperwork, explanations, followups and verification are involved i.e. more moving parts! So the saving is greater if the GTM is implemented.

*Of course, if implementing for an e-commerce site, the requests are more involved. So this is a generalisation for all client types. I estimate my client mix is 50/50 of e-commerce and non-ecommerce sites.

Original conversation and comments on Google+

Also see the post that sparked the debate: “7 Myths & Misconceptions about GTM Busted”: http://bit.ly/GTMmyths