At Numeric, we field a lot of questions about Tag Management. It’s a relatively new technology with many different players. In future posts, we’ll look at the different offerings, but for this entry I’ll outline the symptoms that indicate it may be time to start looking at a TMS.
The Data Layer
To understand how a TMS can help, you need to understand the concept of the data layer. All TMS’s take advantage of a data layer that stands between the pages of your sites and the tools you use to track activity and fire actions. This data layer, if you truly use its value, makes you take a step back to evaluate what you’re doing and make consistent decisions.
Let’s look at concrete situations where this data layer provides value.
Inconsistent tags are leading to data discrepancies
Let’s say that you have several sites where you sell products. You’ve painstakingly ensured that you are consistently tracking revenue and average order value through Adobe SiteCatalyst. Your responsibilities have just expanded to several other websites. Some sites include taxes and shipping in the revenue while others include one or the other or neither. Some sites use Google Analytics and some use SiteCatalyst to capture this information.
A Tag Management System is going to help you standardize this calculation because you’re not coding each individual page of every ecommerce site. Rather, your standard for calculating revenue is defined at a business level and created once in the TMS. The TMS data layer sends the conversion event and consistent order data to the different systems that handle it from there. Your reports that show revenue across different sites will now be an apples-to-apples comparison.
You manage many sites and need to deploy tags quickly and consistently to all of them
A TMS can bring scalability and efficiency to how you handle multiple sites. Extending our conversion example above, let’s say that you want to deploy that conversion logic across all sites. The Tag Management System allows you to centralize the distribution of the tagging.
The TMS gives the programmer a single point of entry for recording the event. From there, the logic you set up in the TMS determines which tools receive a notification that the event has happened and how the data is formatted.
Here’s another example. Let’s say you have a registration system that you’ve tagged so that you can understand how visitors are proceeding through the funnel. You also have several tools that track the completion of registration. For instance, you may be sending this conversion information to both Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst. In the absence of a TMS, each tools’ JavaScript needs to be entered on the page to track the conversion event.
Unless you have a rock solid governance program, this inevitably leads to inconsistency and a maintenance headache. For one tool, conversion might mean clicking the Submit button. For another, conversion might mean the appearance of the Thank You page. The conversion logic is entered in the code on the page. So, fixing this inconsistency once you discover it can mean rewriting the code on each page. With the TMS, you control the consistency centrally and can deploy across multilple sites and tools from that single point.
You need to deploy tags faster
Let’s extend our example of the registration page. For each page, you’ve tagged all the events you want to capture, but now you want to change how one of those events is handled. Maybe you want to tie a user survey to the Thank You page based on a page load event. You have the event tagged on the page, and it is already tied to a SiteCatalyst event.
Without a TMS, you typically have to go through a release cycle to create the specific survey launch tag and deploy it to the page. This is prone to error, and you have to wait for a release cycle.
Here’s where a TMS helps. Independent of a release cycle, you can tie the survey firing to the event. Further, when you’re done with the survey, you disable the tag in the TMS. No legacy code resides on the page. Only the event remains to be reused at some other time. So, all you need to do is to know which events are relevant to a page and tag them once on the page. You use the TMS to leverage those events as often as necessary and avoid “tag bloat” on your pages.
Conclusion
Tag Management promises to make the life of both IT and Marketing easier. The power of the data layer makes it possible to bring consistency and flexibility to tagging. It’s not a quick fix, however. It does take planning and expertise to get the initial implementation set up correctly.
Numeric can help you navigate the emerging market of TMS. If you’d like to learn more contact us.
