Tag Managers vs. Customer Data Platforms: What’s The Difference?

On the surface, tag managers and customer data platforms can sound very similar. Both are components of marketing technology infrastructure that enable a variety of 3rd party applications. Both increase marketing’s agility when it comes to deploying new partners, reducing reliance on engineering resources. Both enhance the end user experience by speeding up digital performance and can help to protect user’s privacy.
But, dig a bit deeper, and the differences are night and day.
Tag managers provide a centralized solution to manage JavaScript and HTML tags, essentially acting as a Content Management System for digital marketing code snippets.
In the pre-tag management world, web developers spent the majority of their time hard coding JavaScript code snippets directly onto web pages to enable 3rd party vendor tracking. Tag managers relieve web developers and their business stakeholders of this burden.
But as we transition into the multi-screen era, the business priorities have shifted. On one level, this is a shift in emphasis from the browser-centric web to engaging consumers across a variety of new devices, many of which don’t accept cookies at all. Moreover, and perhaps even more important, there is also a mindset shift from one-time conversion event to fostering enduring customer relationships and loyalty. So, in addition to tracking pixels for basic web analytics and retargeting, marketers now need to collect mobile-specific data that could be used for push campaigns, personalization, attribution analysis and much more. Together, these represent a step-change in both consumer and marketer behaviors.
Tags work for web, but mobile is a whole different ball game.
While many tag managers have evolved their capabilities considerably over the past five years, their approach to mobile still leaves much to be desired.
By definition, tags are a web-first approach to mobile by deploying a library that powers a hidden web view of the app; the “mobile app data” captured is actually being triggered off of that. This approach tends to be sufficient when the concerns are primarily about load time, however if the goal is to capture all of the data that is essential to mobile marketer’s needs that approach falls flat. (A web view can’t capture a push token, for instance.)
Additionally, many tag managers cannot support mobile-specific vendors via their JavaScript templates. Their quick fix is to compile the vendor’s SDK into the app, alongside their own SDK and rely on a technical resource to build custom logic client-side — which is ironic because one-off integrations are exactly what tag managers are supposed to eliminate!
Beefing up your mobile strategy? You’re going to need a mobile-first data platform, designed for the hyperconnected world.
It’s not that web is obsolete. Web data is highly useful in understanding certain aspects of the customer journey, and tag managers are still a good way to manage JavaScript for the 3rd party technologies you want to deploy across your website.
But if you want to go beyond web, and place some bets on mobile, you’re going to need a Customer Data Platform that plays well with your existing tag management system and mParticle does just that.
