Data is a significant part of many big brands’ success. Customer data makes it easy to understand user behavior, and this information is used for sales and marketing purposes.
The collected data needs to be well managed if a company gains valuable insights and improves its competitive performance. But the tags you integrate into your website to track user behavior can be challenging to keep in order. Implementing tag management is key to ensuring your tags are performing optimally.
This article explains what tag management is and why you need it to improve your digital marketing performance.
What is tag management?
Firstly, what is a tag?
A tag is a piece of code or transparent image (a pixel) integrated into a website or mobile application to collect visitor behavior and transfer the information to marketing platforms. Tags are created to perform specific tasks that support your digital marketing efforts, such as ad-serving, conversion rate tracking, re-marketing, and product recommendations. They also enable live chat, implement surveys, and integrate third-party content. However, having too many tags performing functions in the background can slow down your website and ruin the user experience.
While you can manage and adjust all the tags on your website individually, this is very time-consuming since it’ll require you to make re-adjustment every time there are updates or when running new campaigns. Tag management solutions were created to solve this problem. They allow website owners to quickly gather valuable visitor information and perform management tasks.
What is tag management?
Tag management is the process of keeping the tags on your digital property organized and running efficiently. Tag management solutions provide users with a centralized platform to control their tags, enabling individuals without coding experience to identify the correct data to collect, deploy tags correctly, and manage page speed to drive better customer experiences.
You can use tag management systems across websites, e-commerce stores, mobile apps, and IoT devices.
How does it work?
A TMS takes all your website’s tags and puts them together in a container snippet. The tag management software handles deployment, testing, versioning, and analysis. All you need to do is manage the system.
Each TMS is different, but generally, a tag management system like Google Tag Manager allows users to determine the tags they want, adjust them, add the necessary information, and deploy them to their digital properties. One of the benefits of a TMS is that users don’t need coding experience to manage the platform. You can customize tools, set privacy controls, and perform other management tasks with the click of a button.
Figure 1: The structure of tag management software. Source – Tealium
The data layer is one of the most critical parts of a tag management system. The layer lies between the application layer and the experience layer. It serves as a bridge between your site, the TMS, and other integrated tools that funnel data between the two applications.
What ISN’T tag management?
Tag management is often confused with blog tags, hashtags, search engine meta tags, but it isn’t related to any of these issues. Tags help collect and move data between websites and a technology vendor, and tag management ensures the tags are organized efficiently.
Why does it matter for your business?
Here are some of the benefits that tag management provides to the modern marketer.
Data management
A TMS is a crucial component of your marketing stack. Your marketing automation tools, content management systems, and customer relationship platforms will rely on the data you collect from your tags. The tag management system will not only gather the designated data, but it’ll also integrate it with the other marketing tools to provide you with the insights you need to make intelligent business decisions.
As data is collected about your site visitors, you will:
- Know where they’re coming from
- See the activity they engage in
- Be able to track the conversions that happen onsite
- Get an idea of the channels to use to provide targeted messaging
Optimizes your workflow
Due to the reduced dependency of IT teams in implementing and managing tags for digital marketing campaigns, the whole process has become swift. More than 80 percent of marketers feel that the speed of running marketing campaigns has improved with the use of tag management systems.
With a TMS, you can launch a digital campaign effectively, test options quickly, optimize results faster, and adjust the code instantly when needed.
Improve website performance
Tag management systems ensure your pages load faster, and fast load times help improve the website user experience. Without a TMS, faulty tags will slow your page load speed and overall site performance because the browser must read all the lines to initiate the code.
Tag management solutions solve this problem by deploying tags only when certain conditions are met. This shaves precious time off when a page is loading, resulting in a better visitor experience.
The TMS also supports asynchronous tag deployment. This means that the tags load and fire simultaneously while the webpage is loading without slowing down anything visible to the visitor.
Overall, your site performance is greatly enhanced when you use a tag management system.
Save time, money and resources
Tag management frees up valuable IT and marketing resources for strategic projects. When marketers can run tags without going to the IT department for help on every step in the process, the IT team can focus on other important issues that need their immediate attention.
Likewise, marketers can quickly access valuable data and insights to make informed decisions. They get to spend fewer hours manually sorting through tags and more working on profitable, productive situations.
Tealium revealed that 73 percent of marketers found using a TMS a cost-effective way of managing customer data. The respondents said that tags lowered their costs and improved the ROI of their businesses.
Better customer experience
Tag management allows site owners to provide better experiences to their visitors. By ensuring tags are only deployed when certain conditions are met, webpages load faster, and visitors can access the information they need without waiting too long.
Tag management also enables site owners to comply with privacy regulations. Customers take their right to privacy as important, and if they don’t want you to track their moves, you must comply with their wishes. Tag management systems make it easy for website owners to meet this requirement since privacy compliance is built into the solution. This will help you follow global privacy rules and provide your customers with a better browsing experience.
What does the future hold for tag management?
Because of the critical role tag management plays in the data supply chain, the TMS market is expected to grow steadily over the coming years. The industry was valued at $569.5 million in 2017 and is expected to reach $1.28 billion by 2023 (source: Markets and Markets).
Tag management systems collect and consolidate first-party data, which is considered very powerful and relevant because it captures the behaviors and interactions of your visitors. Brands that work with a tag management company can use this robust first-party data to create unified buyer profiles, driving timely and relevant omnichannel customer experiences while fueling intelligence marketing initiatives.
The need for tag management arose in the late 2000s as businesses found themselves using many digital marketing applications. The applications were meant to help companies to refine their marketing; hence the need for high-performance site tracking and data analytics tools grew.
Since tags are pieces of code added to a website to perform specific tasks, marketers would depend on the IT team to manually change the code when they needed to switch the data points to collect or survey conditions. This process was tedious, and a burden to IT webmasters, who found the coding changes very cumbersome.
Thus with the need to streamline and organize the way tags are created and adjusted, tag management tools were born. These tools have proved quite transformative, with every game marketing agency using them to improve data, conversions, ROI, and customer relationships.
Tag management technologies are predicted to get even more cutting-edge in the coming years to offer more support to the brands that are looking to prosper in today’s fast-paced digital environment. We expect solution providers to offer more integrations with the most common technologies to help marketers meet their marketing goals.
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Tag management is key for businesses that want to strategically manage their data foundation and generate valuable insights to support growth initiatives. The process is quite complex, and you need the help of a tag management company to deploy the right tags and manage them optimally. The team at Growth Marketing Genie is here for you.
Our data analytics agency will help you set up, manage, and maintain tags on your digital properties to help you improve your marketing performance and drive better customer experiences. Get in touch for a chat with our tag management specialists.
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