Ad retargeting and JavaScript tags go hand-in-hand. To learn more about best practices in retargeting – particularly insofar as tag management is concerned – we asked an expert. Matt Greitzer, co-founder and COO of Accordant Media, was kind enough to share his deep knowledge of the subject.

Q: Where does retargeting intersect with tag management?

A: The key component to retargeting is you need to place tags in order to do it. For many clients that’s still a big challenge. It can be surprising that in this day and age it is a challenge, but it is. The ability to have a quick, easy and universal way to place to place and then manage tags across a website is imperative if you’re going to have an effective retargeting campaign.

Is it important to tag every page of an entire site in order to enable retargeting?

Not necessarily an entire site, but it is important to have comprehensive tagging. One mistake marketers make is they think retargeting is a binary practice: if they’ve been to the site remarket to them, if they haven’t been to the site don’t remarket to them. That’s really limiting. The more detail you can collect in the tagging process the more specific you can be in terms of how you’re retargeting your customers.

So to that extent, the more widely you can place tags on the site, the more detail you can get from those tags and the more effective you can be at delivering relevant messages.  That’s something a lot of people don’t do, but it’s a big opportunity in terms of making retargeting better.

Can you run down some best practices for tag management and retargeting?

Well, first you need an easy way to deploy tags on the site. If you can do that without a tag management system, great. If not, a tag management system will make things much easier for you.

The second thing is you need a way to pass data into tags beyond this binary ‘been to the site, not been to the site.’ A tag management solution can make that easier as well.  If you want to pass revenue data or you want to pass other kinds of customer data like customer value there are ways you can do that quickly and easily through a tag management solution that will make your retargeting more effective.

What about about privacy concerns?

In terms of privacy, it’s important that advertisers work with someone in their retargeting efforts who is OBA compliant. There’s an industry-wide push to self-declare whenever behavioral targeting is being used to target advertising.  Advertisers should be aware of that and should make sure they incorporate that into their campaign.  Tag management solutions can help in terms of managing universal opt-outs and things like that in such a way that they’re complaint and so that the advertiser doesn’t have to worry about it or deal with it on their own.