WHAT IS TAG MANAGEMENT AND WHY DO YOU NEED IT?
You will need a different tag for each marketing vendor, so one for Adobe Analytics, one for Google Analytics, another for Doubleclick AdWords and so on.
A developer can add a tag for you and configure your data collection but this will take time and money. Also, from experience we know they won’t always get the configuration right first time or deploy it quickly enough.
The answer is to use a Tag Management Solution, or “TMS” for short.
A TMS allows you to deploy tags efficiently and quickly through a user interface rather than going through a developer for every change. You then have control over data collection and can thoroughly test changes before committing them to the live site.
There are many Tag Management providers. They are usually categorised as free or paid-for solutions.
And remember that “free” tools may still require skill, time and effort to configure.
Tealium is regarded by many as providing the market leading TMS. It has the best user interface, highest number of supported marketing tags, most features and is the easiest to use.
Plus, Tealium has great complimentary tools to help you connect data across teams, vendors and touchpoints in real-time which can power personalisation, retargeting and advanced reporting.
In our opinion, Tealium iQ is the best tool for deploying Adobe Analytics (which is the most complex tag).
A similarly comprehensive TMS but one that requires more coding expertise. Which may or may not be an issue, and could slow down your implementation.
Also known as “GTM”, Google Tag Manager is the most popular solution worldwide.
It is lacking certain features, and vendor support is from a large community of end users rather than Google.
But it’s a very capable product and if you just want to deploy Google Analytics, it would be a sensible choice.
A new offering from Summer 2017, Adobe Launch has been built from scratch with a lot of focus on open APIs and a tag market place where developers can create their own solutions.
The functionality of Adobe Launch will be largely similar to its predecessor, Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager (“DTM”), but with greater control over how and when tags fire.
It looks like a good product but our expectation is that the client-base will be limited. This is because Adobe Analytics customers will continue to pay for Tealium or Ensighten to secure the best solution.
You will need to deploy a snippet of code from the TMS vendor on each page of your site. Your developer will be able to do this very quickly.
Once this has been done, you can deploy your marketing tags.
However, a great implementation is likely to require certain web site data to be made available to the TMS; such as the product name and price. This is often referred to as the universal data layer.
Making enough time to plan your data layer means you will have a more stable and complete implementation. Which in turn means you will have quality data available for your tags.
Delivering better visitor experiences and improving conversion rates requires good quality data.
If you are struggling to get the most from your investment in Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics please get in touch.
We will help you understand where your implementation can be improved and how to go about doing it. And if you are lacking resource or skills, we can take care of the changes for you.
If you need help to implement and get started with targeting and personalisation, such as Adobe Target, please get in touch.
People can be great at spotting tagging mistakes but are likely to struggle to scale their validation efforts across a site or even a key journey.
Ideally you want to be doing this frequently, at least before and after any site change.
Which is why specialist tools are invaluable and we partner with Data True and ObservePoint to deliver automated tag monitoring and validation services.