[javajosh]

Ha, this product is very clever. You are effectively bootstrapping yourself into arbitrary page execution environments, and giving (non-technical) users the ability to parameterize and manipulate that environment.

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.

[jkent]

Under the Google Tag Manager Terms of Service, the account holder owns the data. We don't do anything with that data without your consent and Google Tag Manager collects very little data itself - it's cookie-less. I hope that helps!

[javajosh]

Then I guess I'm confused as to what Google's angle is here. I presume there's at least a small team of 6-figure salaried programmers behind this, so what justifies the expense?

[darien]

To compete in the growing Tag Management Market. Adobe offers a Tag Management service and there are many other paid premium versions. Tag Management is a tool for digital marketers to deploy agile javascript code in a technical environment where site builds are not agile.

[enomar]

Tagging is friction on Ad campaigns. Remove that friction and marketers can run more/better campaigns, thus spending more money with Google.