Moving tags & scripts into a server-side application sounds similar to the new Server-Side Container type available from Google Tag Manager. Is there an overlap in the use case, and if so, what are the differentiators for Zaraz?
I do analytics, and would love to have tools available to help customers not load the 200th tag into GTM. I don't think many customers actually want a bloated container, but their marketing team needs a new tag now and they don't have the bandwidth to do proper maintenance. Having a tool I could recommend would be beneficial.
Useful features would be ones for maintaining tags long-term, especially where tagging is done by multiple teams. E.g. error reporting that certain tags report 404's from the vendor because they are malformed, or haven't been fired since June of 2016 because they're for a page that was redesigned.
Great points! GTM server-side tagging is indeed similar to one of our features, Cloud Load. The main difference would be that GTM essentially gives you the server-side capabilities for Google Analytics only, and the rest you have to code yourself. We offer all those integrations out of the box, and we maintain them, so you don't need a dev team to do that.
But more importantly, Cloud Load is only one out of many things we do. A library of facades for your widgets, firing conversion pixels together with the page.unload() event, evaluating which tools should be loaded on our backend instead of in the browser - all these are much outside the scope of GTM, server-side or client-side. We think they're invaluable because at the end of the day, many tools can't be loaded completely from the server. Everything that uses HTTP cookies or is interacting with the DOM would eventually needs to load in the page.
As for long-term maintain tags - since our bundling feature actually sends HTTP requests to your third-parties, we know when they give a 404. We're working on adding the "last fired" date to the dashboard too. Stay tuned! :)
I do analytics, and would love to have tools available to help customers not load the 200th tag into GTM. I don't think many customers actually want a bloated container, but their marketing team needs a new tag now and they don't have the bandwidth to do proper maintenance. Having a tool I could recommend would be beneficial.
Useful features would be ones for maintaining tags long-term, especially where tagging is done by multiple teams. E.g. error reporting that certain tags report 404's from the vendor because they are malformed, or haven't been fired since June of 2016 because they're for a page that was redesigned.