Celebration

5 years ago, on 1st October 2012, this lovely video popped up in Google’s Analytics Blog:

It was accompanied by a blog post, which contained a brief look into many of Google Tag Manager’s key features, some of which are still relevant today.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks.

At this time, those of us who started using the tool immediately, or who had been beta-testing it, saw quickly what the key selling point of GTM was. It was a way to impact change on the website as quickly as possible, without having to wait for a release to be verified and pushed live.