What is a Data Layer? What is a Tag Management System?
When talking about setting up analytics tracking or website retargeting, the topic of data layer and tag management system often comes in play, but what do they do? how they they work?
When and why do you need a data layer?
Let’s take the example of a fictional website CatCo, CatCo is a website dedicated to cat pictures.It makes money by seller frame pictures of cat and has as its goal to increase its user-base 2 fold in the next 12 months. To do that CatCo wants to increase its marketing reach and performance by integrating and pushing data to as many marketing platform as possible and keeping a close look at the marketing’s performance.
CatCo however is very short staff in terms of engineers and cannot do by itself the integration to so many external system. CatCo has a problem.
Comes the data layer and tag management system. The data layer allows to set a structure for the data needed for integration with third parties website.
A Data Layer typically refers to the data object available within a browser for integration with third parties.
Let’s have a look at CatCo, CatCo wants to integrate with Google Analytics, Facebook and Bing. It doesn’t integrate with them directly but integrates with a Tag Management System that…
