By Matthew Coers, Senior Architect, Josh Murano, Senior Consultant, and Greg Laugero, VP Services and Strategy of Numeric Analytics
In part one of this topic, we looked at Tag Management Systems from the perspective of free and paid solutions, and what it means for providing marketing with some independence from IT. In this post, we will focus on the three primary use cases that will help you evaluate Tag Management Systems and know if you can benefit from this technology. We’ll also provide specific questions you can ask vendors to see these features in action.
Use Case 1: Managing Tags across Multiple Web Properties
As a Web Property Manager you have a number of sites that you need to tag, and you want to ensure they are all using the same code base.
With a Tag Management solution, you centrally manage tags for all of your websites. Depending on the specific system you select, you can achieve several advantages:
- You can quickly add tags to new platforms and pages.
- You can roll out updates across all platforms to maintain evergreen deployments – without having to go page-to-page making changes.
- Additionally, because you centrally manage tags for all domains, you can avoid mismatched variables in rollup reports.
- Enforce consistent calculations and data definitions
Here are some of the features you want to look for to achieve this use case, and the questions you can ask the vendors you are evaluating:
- Ask to see how easy it is to share tagging code from one website to another
- Ask to see how they centrally manage variable assignments to prevent mismatched variables
- Ask to see how they support controlled governance processes for deploying tags to websites and assigning variables to tags.
- Ask to see a list of pre-built “connectors” or built-in tags. This is a major step to ease of implementation and consistency. Make sure that the tools you use are on the list.
- Ask to see how you can add custom tags manually with JavaScript.
- Ask to see how easy it is to start, stop, pause, add and delete tags from multiple sites.
- Ask to see how the TMS manages development, staging and production environments. How extensible are these environments? Can you add additional layers in an open architecture, or is the system locked down to two or three layers?
Tag Management Systems make it much easier to see which platforms are using which tags and to enforce standards for each tag. For example, revenue calculations are often inconsistent. Some include taxes and shipping, some only one or the other, and some ignore them altogether when calculating the value of a transaction. With a TMS, you can enforce a standard calculation across platforms so that your analysts are making apples to apples comparisons.
Use Case 2: Hot Fixes
As a Web Property Manager you just had a major release. Since it’s been in production you’ve found some high priority bugs or content changes that need an immediate fix.
Because Tag Management is integrated into your platform, it is possible to add a temporary hotfix to your platform to resolve the issue until you can take the necessary time to put in a more permanent fix.
Ask these questions to understand the vendor’s depth of capabilities:
- How can you modify variables on the fly without code deployments?
- How can you modify site content on the fly without code deployments?
- How can you add tracking variables to page objects without the need to redeploy code?
Use Case 3: Code Version Management and Rollback
As a Web Analytics Manager you want to be able to easily keep track of your code versions and roll back if necessary.
Tag Management allows you to not only keep a history of your changes and releases, it also allows you to keep free-form notes and to roll back on specific versions as needed.
Here are the questions you can ask to understand the vendor’s depth of capabilities:
- How do you view published versions of code and roll back if necessary?
- How do you view and managed development versions of code?
- Where do you keep notes on code updates?
Conclusion
These are the fundamental use cases for any TMS you may be considering. In Part 3, we’ll look at some more advanced use cases, including managing variables and contextual tags.
