Choosing a Tag Management System for Your Website
Anyone who deals with tags knows what a burden they can be. Tags provide many crucial benefits when it comes to site analytics and tracking ad campaigns, but they can easily become a drain on IT resources, your budget, and your website’s performance when you’re trying to manage them on your own.
Tags are lines of code that sit on a Web page and allow you to track where a visitor came from (e.g., via search engine, e-mail link, etc.), what organic or paid keywords may have been used to find your page, and what campaign and medium was used (e.g., display ads, e-mail campaign, pay-per-click, etc.). In addition to helping you perform site analytics -- who’s looking at your page, where they came from, and how they found you -- the information included in these lines of code can determine which ad should appear when a user visits the page, and they can record statistics such as how many times a specific ad was delivered.
Tags are good in theory, but the process can become convoluted when your website becomes loaded down with multiple tags from multiple sources. This not only slows page download speeds, but it also makes it difficult to manage all the different incoming data, record accurate analytics, and ensure you’re not paying twice for a single lead.
The solution is a tag management system that houses all the individual tags under a single, small universal tag. This universal tag replaces all the tags on your site with a single line of code that sits on every page, but it still allows the multiple tags to perform their individual functions. You manage the deployment of tags and track the incoming data through a single interface.
Many large corporations have already adopted tag management systems, but small businesses should be just as interested, if not more. Deploying and maintaining tags is not only tedious and time consuming, but it can be downright confusing if you’re not adept at coding.
There are a variety of tag management products out there, but they all serve the same purpose: to give you control of your data and tracking, cut costs, save resources, and strengthen your site’s performance.
Three good places to start are TagMan, Ensighten, and Tealium Universal Tag.
- TagMan primarily targets e-commerce companies that advertise online, allowing them to retain the data and insight from their campaigns by giving control of the data to them, rather than to the tag owner. One of the principal benefits of TagMan is de-duplication, which is a growing concern for many marketing and e-commerce teams. De-duplication ensures a Web marketer doesn’t get charged twice when a single lead comes in from more than one source. TagMan claims it can save clients an average of 25 percent on commission payments by offering a complete view of the journey a customer took to get to the website, allowing marketers to identify which channel actually delivered the lead.
- Ensighten’s easy-to-use interface makes it easy to change, add, or remove tags without racking up IT and developer costs or triggering delays that can compromise your site’s performance. Ensighten claims it can reduce the involvement of IT, agency, and vendor resources by more than 90 percent by handling every element of the tag management life cycle. It also claims it cuts the time it takes to deploy new vendor tools from months down to days.
- Tealium Universal Tag also claims it can shave weeks and months from the tag implementation cycle without sucking up valuable IT resources. Its user-friendly Tag Management Console uses a drag-and-drop user interface that allows you to easily add or delete new marketing tags without having to re-tag pages one by one. It also allows you to easily add new affiliate vendors and edit your Web analytics deployment.
No matter which tag management product you use, you’ll quickly see your return on investment emerge and continue to grow. Tag management is the easy, cost-effective way to manage and track your site’s data and strengthen your site’s performance without draining your resources, time, and money.
