This article gives an overview of tag management and offers advice to businesses considering investing in this new marketing technology.
What is Tag Management?
Tag management systems enable business users to manage (add, edit, and delete tags) by installing a “single line of code” on all their web pages.
A tag refers to a snippet of code that is installed on a website from a third party to accomplish a goal such as a website analytics tag, or a re-targeting tag for instance. Tags can also be web-site functionality such as live chat services.
Benefits of Tag Management Systems
Tag management systems offer a wide range of benefits for businesses, including efficient tracking, reduction in IT resources, accurate tracking, faster page load times, better SEO, and higher conversions.
Here are some key benefits of tag management:
- Reduce tech resources – Saves large amounts of engineering time in adding, deleting, or editing tags because the systems come with pre-configured tags already – you just need to enter your account id or similar values and the tag is ready to go.
- Increase accuracy – Reduces human error in tag deployment.
- Significantly increase marketing agility – Make it simple and quick to try new things, thus increasing the likelihood of finding that one new special strategy or channel that can accelerate growth.
- Reduce page load time – This impacts the purchase conversion rate from your site visitors as well as improves your SEO ranking with google as that is taken into consideration in their algorithm.
- Data protection – Only fire tags when they should be fired so that third parties do not get more insight into your customers than they need to.
- De-duplication of conversions – Make sure your payable conversion firing events are 100% aligned with your true business deal and avoid paying twice for the same conversion.
- Improved system reliability – Using asynchronous tag loading no tag will ever make the page time out the consumers. Third party systems no longer impacts your site.
Additional Benefits in Tag Management Systems
Depending on the solution, tag management systems can also provide additional benefits including:
- Versioning – Ability to do roll back to a certain previous configuration and keep track of changes to your tags.
- Auditing & access rights – Helping to control which users can change a tag as well as giving you a complete history of tag changes by different users.
- Meta-data management – Create a library of well defined variables that are available about your visitors on the web-site – re-use these variables in rules and inserted into tags as variables. Some systems provides an out of the box meta data model to make this easier for you – specific to your business model.
- Cross environment deployment – Streamlines the change process across development, staging, and production environments.
If you are interested in learning more about tag management, please schedule an appointment with one of our marketing technology experts by completing the form to the right.
