Tag Management —
Your Key to Digital Intelligence
With the Internet struggling through its adolescent years, it’s beginning to reach a level of maturity that can handle the majority of incoming leads for some businesses. Unlike traditional marketing channels, the web lends itself to the direct measurement of an array of sophisticated Customer Insights (CI) we’ve never seen before.
Sophisticated tracking of engagement and conversions of digital properties has become the norm with many services offering a JavaScript based code tag that can be embedded on a webpage to do the heavy lifting of helping to gather customer data. However the ease of adding tracking tags, and the sheer proliferation of platforms and products can lead to tag overload.
“In the name of digital intelligence, CI pros continue to adopt more third-party technologies, and today the vast majority of firms have multiple ways of measuring and interacting with customers via digital touchpoints.” James McCormick (Forrester), June 10, 2014(1).
The need for tag management
I remember casting an eye over my first analytics profile many years ago and being in awe of the amount of data collected. Page views, unique users, bounce rates, events and goals completed, it can be overwhelming. Many vendors offer products to track these insights on your own website or digital properties, and advertising and social platforms are also increasingly offering custom analytics for the channel they manage — like Facebook, Twitter and Google Adwords.
With so many different tags from vendors and platforms available tag management solutions have evolved to simplify the way these tags are managed, and with these solutions the art of tag management has become another specialisation for digital marketers to develop.
What is it?
Tag management tools provide the process to manage external marketing and analytical tools, capturing site data and pushing it to the tools in the expected format. This can be as comprehensive as populating analytics applications (such as Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics or Web Trends) with advanced datasets or can be as simplistic as applying a conversion tracking pixel to the “success” page of an ecommerce site.
Tag management tools give marketers with the flexibility to apply tags to track things such as page views or user events without the need to involve a technical development team to make site changes. This gives marketers more direct control over their data gathering and insights platforms at lower cost.
Solving problems
Digital Intelligence is a race to the top, with everyone attempting to own the journey. But the real challenge is defining what information is required to give you a competitive advantage. As all sites and businesses are unique, it’s important to understand the landscape and how you will use the insights gathered.
Once a tracking plan has been determined, businesses can implement a number of tracking tags across the site. Tags should be considered a work-in-progress as sites change over time, data requirements evolve and tracking techniques improve.
Tag management systems support rapid learning and optimisation by providing a layer between a site and tracking tools like Google Analytics. In doing so they handle a range of potential issues:
● Tags can be added seamlessly, without use of development resources
● Increased visibility of all tags across the site
● Reduces code-bloat and page load issues
● Handles new tag requirements
● Streamlines Digital Intelligence
Tag management tools (such as Google Tag Manager) typically provide a single ‘container‘ script which gets embedded across a website and into which individual tag scripts files are loaded asynchronously to manage all current and future tag requirements site-wide. The beauty of this technique is that the containing requirements don’t impact the site speed, regardless of scale. Site speed is crucial to the performance of a site and by minimising the impact of tracking codes on pages Tag management solutions ensure the site remains optimised.
Getting the most from a web asset
Most tracking tools come with a range of customisable features. Goal and event tracking requirements can be highly detailed and are rarely met by simply tracking the number of views to a particular page. This is where tag manager solutions come into a world of their own. By enabling digital marketers to more flexibly adjust their on-going requirements, tag managers enable a more flexible and agile approach to tracking user behaviour.
Developing insights into the primary touchpoints of a web asset leads to more dynamic marketing strategies; helping to lower marketing spend and deliver better outcomes. Opportunities such as highly targeted ‘remarketing’ campaigns, become more readily available, and can lead to increased conversion rates and more effective marketing activities.
The future of tag management
The web is no longer about simply having a presence, as websites are increasingly leveraged to generate leads and amplify sales. Tag management systems are the way forward to streamline and funnel Digital Intelligence into a format that can be understood and acted upon by marketing teams.
Reactive assists these teams by offering our knowledge behind how we use tag management tools to better understand the customers’ journey as they interact with our client’s digital offerings. As the tools can be quite complex to configure, before we start collecting the data we need to understand what customer insights we want to draw on, and at which stage of their journey. This helps us to better translate the collected data into a complete picture, which the client can use to make smarter digital marketing business decisions.
With Customer Insights still in its infancy on the web and an ever-evolving marketplace of mobile devices and wearables, there are always new insights to be uncovered. Adopting the right tag management solution will soon be a necessity for all businesses to compete in a highly informed market.
1. Gauging Web Analytics Practices In The Age Of The Customer, Forrester, June 2014. Retrieved May 2015.
