Why 90% of marketers still can’t use Google Tag Manager (and what I built to fix it)
I’ve worked in digital marketing for over 20 years, and one thing kept surprising/annoying me:
Google Tag Manager was supposed to free marketers from developer dependency. But in the real world, most marketers still hit brick walls. Not because they don’t try hard enough, but because the tool wasn’t really made for them in the first place.
Here’s the rough reality:
To track a “Request Demo” button you often need to choose between CSS selectors, trigger types, and API-style logic. Things most people learned after they already became marketers.
GTM’s interface gives you a dozen ways to do the same thing, so choosing the “right” way often ends up being a guessing game with trial and error.
For real tracking, like AJAX form submissions or eCommerce events, you quickly end up needing custom JavaScript or a Dev.
That means instead of being a simple marketer tool, GTM becomes a developer dependency in disguise, and that’s exactly what I kept running into with teams I coached.
To address that, I built something called Tag Companion. A point-and-click generator that produces GTM container code for marketers, without making them write CSS, JavaScript, or debug triggers manually.
I’m curious to hear from people here:
Have you ever hit the “GTM complexity wall”? What was the toughest part?
Did you end up hiring a developer for something GTM “should have made easy”?
What do you wish a tag-management tool could do that GTM doesn’t?
If anyone’s interested, here’s the article where I laid out the problem in detail (and a link to the tool): https://www.tagcompanion.com/blog/why-most-marketers-cant-use-google-tag-manager/
Would love to hear your thoughts.
