By Brian Danin |

At DrupalCon Atlanta 2025, I had the privilege of presenting “Tag! You’re It. Digital ‘freeze’ tag with GTM” - a session exploring how to master Google Tag Manager while balancing the competing demands of privacy compliance and website performance.

The Modern Tag Management Challenge

For marketers and developers alike, Google Tag Manager (GTM) has become an indispensable tool. It simplifies the deployment and management of various tags across your website - analytics tags, marketing pixels, tracking scripts, and more - all without requiring coding skills for each change.

But GTM introduces a modern paradox: the same tool that empowers marketing teams can simultaneously hurt your website’s performance and complicate privacy compliance efforts.

The Privacy vs. Performance Dilemma

Managing your tags correctly is essential for two critical (and sometimes competing) goals:

Privacy Compliance

Privacy features may require additional scripts, consent management platforms, and complex logic to ensure you’re meeting regulations like GDPR and CCPA. These additions can significantly slow down your website.

Website Performance

Optimizing for performance focuses on minimizing unnecessary scripts and tags, reducing page load time, and improving Core Web Vitals scores - which directly impact your search rankings.

The challenge? These two priorities often pull in opposite directions.

What You’ll Learn from This Session

In my DrupalCon Atlanta presentation, I covered practical strategies to master GTM and apply it to your website with confidence. Here are the key takeaways:

1. Configure GTM Effectively

Learn how to set up GTM with precision using:

  • Triggers that fire at the right moments
  • Tags that load only when needed
  • Trigger groups for complex, multi-condition setups

Whether you’re implementing basic pageview tracking or advanced e-commerce measurement, understanding these fundamentals is crucial for any setup - simple or sophisticated.

Navigate the complex landscape of privacy regulations by:

  • Comparing the European opt-out model versus the American opt-in style
  • Integrating consent management platforms like OneTrust
  • Implementing privacy-first tagging strategies that respect user choices
  • Understanding how different regions require different approaches to data collection

The session provides practical examples of how to configure GTM to respect user consent while still gathering the data you need for marketing decisions.

3. Enhance Website Performance

Discover optimization techniques that can dramatically improve your site’s speed:

  • Delaying non-essential tags to prioritize critical content loading
  • Improving Core Web Vitals scores through strategic tag management
  • Boosting search rankings by reducing the performance impact of marketing scripts
  • Implementing lazy loading for tags that don’t need to fire immediately

These strategies help you maintain the marketing flexibility that GTM provides without sacrificing the performance that Google’s algorithms reward.

The “Freeze Tag” Metaphor

The session title references the childhood game of freeze tag - and it’s an apt metaphor for modern tag management. Just like in the game, you need to know:

  • When to freeze (delay or block tags based on consent or priority)
  • When to unfreeze (allow tags to load once conditions are met)
  • Who’s “it” (which tags are essential versus which can wait)

This playful approach to a serious technical topic helps both marketers and developers understand the strategic decisions behind effective tag management.

Real-World Impact

By the end of this session, attendees walked away with practical strategies to:

✅ Optimize GTM setup for any level of complexity ✅ Ensure privacy compliance without breaking marketing capabilities ✅ Improve performance without sacrificing functionality ✅ Balance competing priorities between legal, marketing, and technical teams

Why This Matters for Marketers

As highlighted in the Top DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 Sessions Every Marketer Should See, this session was specifically designed with marketers in mind.

You don’t need to be a developer to benefit from understanding GTM. In fact, marketers who grasp these concepts can:

  • Make more informed decisions about tag deployment
  • Communicate more effectively with technical teams
  • Understand the trade-offs between tracking capabilities and site performance
  • Take ownership of their tag management strategy

The Bigger Picture

Google Tag Manager sits at the intersection of marketing, privacy, and performance - three of the most critical concerns for modern websites. Getting it right means:

  1. Marketing teams can track what matters without constant developer intervention
  2. Privacy teams can ensure compliance with evolving regulations
  3. Development teams can maintain the performance standards that Google rewards

When these three priorities align, everyone wins - especially your users.

Taking Action

Whether you attended DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 in person or are watching the recording, here are some immediate actions you can take:

  1. Audit your current GTM setup - Review which tags are loading and when
  2. Implement consent management - Ensure you’re meeting privacy requirements for your audience
  3. Test tag delay strategies - Experiment with postponing non-critical tags
  4. Measure the impact - Use Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to see improvements
  5. Document your decisions - Create a tag governance policy for your organization

Resources and Further Learning

Want to dive deeper into GTM, privacy, and performance optimization? Check out these related resources:

Connect and Continue the Conversation

Have questions about implementing these strategies? Want to share your own GTM success stories or challenges? I’d love to hear from you.

Tag management doesn’t have to be a game of freeze tag where you’re stuck choosing between privacy and performance. With the right strategies, you can have both - and your website (and your users) will thank you for it.

This session was presented at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 on Tuesday, March 25, 2025, in the Baker Room as part of the SVG Content & Marketing track.

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