Tag man­age­ment: basics & systems

Web analysis is an important aspect of online marketing. In order to find out how your campaigns and marketing measures are per­form­ing as well as how much influence they have on the company’s success, you first need to know how visitors found their way to your website. What was the decisive step to make a con­ver­sion happen? JavaScript code snippets (tags) are used in order to collect visitors’ movements and data flows to be analyzed later so that online marketing measures can be optimized to increase sales. Tags are now being in­te­grat­ed into almost all web and mobile sites to receive in­for­ma­tion about user activity.

Once the data has been obtained, it means that many critical success factors and strategic questions can be answered: which measures con­tribute to the profit? Which ones lead to nothing despite you having invested an adequate sum of money? Which channels are effective? What are the obstacles that prevent con­ver­sions from happening?

Tag man­age­ment has es­tab­lished itself as an important dis­ci­pline for surveying data and therefore enabling marketers to answer these questions and adapt mea­sure­ments and targets with speed as well as flex­i­bil­i­ty. Learn more about the most important fun­da­men­tals sur­round­ing tag man­age­ment.

In online marketing, short code snippets (tags) enable marketers to closely follow visitor activity on their website. The tags are often available to third-party providers e.g. ad­ver­tis­ing platforms or affiliate marketing services. Three types of tags are generally used: counter, con­ver­sion, and re­mar­ket­ing tags. Here is an overview of the different type of tags:

• Counter tag: this kind of tag can easily be trans­lat­ed using 'tracking pixels'. The tag counts how many times a user visits the website.

• Con­ver­sion tag: this tag de­ter­mines the number of con­ver­sions on a website. Con­ver­sions can be sales (orders from an online store), but also contact requests, white paper downloads, newslet­ter sub­scrip­tions, or reg­is­ter­ing for webinars. This kind of tag helps marketers measure the success of a campaign by assigning the con­ver­sion to a single ad­ver­tis­ing measure. This also provides valuable input when it comes to op­ti­miz­ing your site.

• Re­mar­ket­ing tag: re­mar­ket­ing is often referred to as re­tar­get­ing, and its task is to address users who have shown interest in an offer or product – usually with ad­ver­tise­ments on third-party websites or through search engines. On your own website, the re­mar­ket­ing tag is used to identify returning visitors. For these visitors, you can use a cus­tomized ad­ver­tis­ing strategy to address them more per­son­al­ly, and to increase the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a con­ver­sion.

Just like the name suggests, this deals with the man­age­ment of tags. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, you can manually insert and manage each in­di­vid­ual tag but if there are any sub­se­quent changes to the website, any new campaigns, or a change in providers these tags will need to be adapted. This might work with small web projects con­sist­ing of only a few pages but for larger websites or online stores it becomes a mammoth task. Existing codes must be flexibly adapted and new snippets im­ple­ment­ed regularly.

In addition, these tasks are often difficult to ac­com­plish without IT support. Due to limited resources and tedious processes tag man­age­ment can easily become time-consuming and annoying. If you use an external provider you also have to factor in the costs.

Tag man­age­ment systems (TMS) have been developed as a solution. After setting them up, companies can integrate, edit, and manage tracking tags without having to rely on the source code or limited IT resources. A browser-based interface enables automated and effective tag man­age­ment without the need for IT expertise.

A tag man­age­ment system is used to manage different tags on websites and mobile ap­pli­ca­tions. A simple com­par­i­son can be made with well-known content man­age­ment systems (CMS), which are used to manage the contents of websites. Similar to the CMS, the TMS also has the ability to define access rights and user groups, manage content, and edit and manage tasks.

As a rule, no profound pro­gram­ming skills are required and marketers and other employees can work in­de­pen­dent­ly of IP support. A browser-based, simple user interface is available to use, just like with content man­age­ment. Users can, for example, implement analytics scripts, re­mar­ket­ing tracking, affiliate tracking, con­ver­sion tracking, or manage publisher tags for banner ad­ver­tis­ing. These are then displayed to visitors on a rule and filter basis.

An important note: in general, no analysis is possible via tag man­age­ment systems. Some vendors have a web analytics system connected, usually via the TMS, but this is only tag man­age­ment, and not the thorough analysis you probably desire.

There are various tag man­age­ment tools on the market, all of which offer different features. Among the most popular com­mer­cial solutions are Tealium or Tag Commander. Adobe customers can use the Ac­ti­va­tion core service to implement tags. Google also provides a tag man­age­ment solution for websites and mobile apps with its free Google Tag Manager.

Tag man­age­ment creates the basis for a detailed web analysis and is therefore of great im­por­tance in online marketing. For marketers, tag man­age­ment can be very ben­e­fi­cial, es­pe­cial­ly if you’re using a partly automatic tag man­age­ment solution. Using the central control system and the tag au­toma­tion saves a lot of time and money. Managing tags manually would be much more complex and costly and often requires IT expertise es­pe­cial­ly if changes to the source code are to be made. Using a man­age­ment solution saves IT resources since it only needs a one-time set up and employees can use it them­selves after receiving training on how to manage tags.

• Further ad­van­tages at a glance:
• Main overview of all tags used
• Marketing processes im­ple­ment­ed more ef­fec­tive­ly and faster
• Can react and adapt quickly to changes without prior con­sul­ta­tion with IT
• Marketing team in­de­pen­dent of IT
• User-friendly and intuitive interface
• Access to tag libraries, problem-free im­ple­men­ta­tion of third-party tags possible.

There are also some risks and stumbling blocks when using the system. Even if the operation is largely in­de­pen­dent of hardcore IT, the systems still need to be pro­fes­sion­al­ly set up and im­ple­ment­ed.

Nonethe­less, the ad­van­tages outweigh the dis­ad­van­tages. The tag man­age­ment system sim­pli­fies the work in online marketing and ac­cel­er­ates many processes – es­pe­cial­ly by allowing marketers to work in­de­pen­dent­ly on various topics, which is normally only feasible with rel­a­tive­ly intense IT as­sis­tance. Tag man­age­ment systems allow marketers to work more flexibly, react faster to changes, and adapt new campaigns in real-time.