Tag Management

What is Tag Management?

What is a Tag?

A tag is a segment of JavaScript code that is integrated into an organization’s web and mobile site in order to monitor and collect data on user activity. These tags are usually offered by digital marketing vendors and can be used for tracking, analysis, reporting, and advertising.

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What is a Tag Management System?

Tag management is the process of monitoring and maintaining marketing tags integrated into digital properties. A tag management system (TMS) is a solution, usually provided by a third-party vendor, that simplifies the processes of implementing, maintaining, and sunsetting the increasing number of tag implementations an organization employs.

Reclaim your time and increase the productivity of your team using Technology Governance to consistently look for data collection gaps that exist across your entire website.

MarTech Growth Necessitates TMS

Over the last several years, the growth of digital marketing technologies has increased dramatically. Marketing technology and service vendors have been racing to develop solutions that address marketers increasingly diverse business needs. Tag management systems developed out of necessity to help facilitate technology implementation and maintenance, without having to rely on IT.

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How a TMS Works

Tag management systems are integrated on websites or mobile apps and are used to consolidate and control all other tag implementations. With a TMS, organizations can easily deploy, update, or remove any tag on their digital properties with the click of a button. Enterprise TMSs can also provide customization, data governance, security and privacy controls, technical support, and more.

What is a Data Layer?

Simply put, a data layer is a central repository for the data collected by technologies deployed within an organization’s digital properties. The data layer stores types of information such as user behavior data, e-commerce transaction intelligence and mobile app usage. When the data layer is clearly defined, tag management solutions can more efficiently ensure the data is collected by the technologies, sorted into and stored in the data layer, and then channeled into analytics solutions.

 

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Benefits of a TMS

  • Take control of chaotic tags - Manually governing multiple digital technology integrations across various channels can be chaotic. Tag management systems help bring order to tag strategies with ease.
  • Expedite marketing efforts - Through implementation, testing, and maintaining, tag management systems accelerate your marketing campaign time frames by simplifying the process and circumventing IT.
  • Improve digital performance - Old tags can be missed during updating and cause slow loading pages that frustrate users. Tag managements systems identify these tags so they can be eradicated.
  • Create uniform marketing - Structuring an underlying data layer through a tag management system consolidates data collection, ensuring that marketing has a uniform pool from which to develop strategies and to validate implementations.
  • Prevent privacy issues - Centralizing vendor tags and data collection with a tag management system helps to manage and protect privacy compliance and data governance best practices.

Tag Auditing and Management

Tag auditing means scanning your digital properties to identify all third-party and custom tagging implementations to validate accurate data collection. Even after implementing a tag management solution, things break—tags go missing or are duplicated, links break and JavaScript code is corrupted, old third-party implementations are not fully eradicated, etc.—a digital governance solution audits all of your implementations to ensure the data they are collecting is accurate.

 

 

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Is a Tag Management System Right for You?

Here are a few questions to help decide whether or not you should adopt a tag management system:

 

  • Do you consistently use five or more digital marketing technologies?
  • Is your organization preparing to launch a major marketing effort such as a site redesign or new campaigns?
  • Are you currently using an enterprise level analytics solution?
  • Do you have a new app that’s about to be pushed live?
  • Do you use only a few digital marketing technologies?
  • Is your team large enough and does it have enough resources to efficiently implement and maintain tags?

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