Evolution of Tag Management

As JavaScript tags for tracking a website’s campaigns become increasingly complex, every marketer longs for the holy grail of tag management to solve their problems and give them freedom and control.

And while Tag Management Systems (TMS) are emerging as the leading solution in the space now, they weren’t the first.

Let’s take a closer look at the tag management solutions that emerged over time–from pixel piggy backing to a container tag to the universal tag, and finally to TMS.

Pixel Piggy Backing
Pixel piggy backing involves customizing a third-party image tag or code — for each page of your site — that sets cookies in a user’s browser to track their behavior.

While this method has been known to provide real-time data for publishers and advertisers, its customizations can be just as complex — if not more complex — than implementing JavaScript tags. Page-load time also increases, as the pixels are often placed on the bottom of the page.

Container Tag
Likewise, a container tag also sometimes further complicates site tag implementation. Since its third-party code loads an in iFrame (also often at the bottom of the page) there’s an increase in page-load time, turning away site visitors and affecting ranking in Google and other search engines. Most important, container tags only work with about 50% of vendor tags. And they won’t play very well with your web analytics systems.

Universal Tag
Given its name, the universal tag has been heralded as the great hope of tag management.  What you get with this tag is one single code–that directly loads scripts into the page–to capture data from all other data sources. It’s essentially one code format that many vendors have to agree to so that all data can flow through the one source. Sure, this solution can save time and cost, but it can result in being locked in with one vendor (often a web analytics vendor).

Tag Management Systems
Tag Management Systems (TMS) take the concepts of the universal tag and the container tag one step further. Acting like a content management system for all site-wide tags, TMS enables placing all tags–including container and universal tags–into one system. The application deploys just one snippet of code on each page to manage them all, and instead of serving all tags on all pages at all times TMS only serves tags as needed. Furthermore, advertisers and agencies can manage all third-party data collection services in one place, ultimately reducing the need for IT as a resource, improving quality control, and expediting the go-live time for new and updated tags and campaigns.

We’re living in a data-driven age, where marketers need to prove ROI. They’re reliant on tracking systems that end up littering websites with pixels, tags, and widgets. Because of this, the need for a tag management solution is becoming more critical. Investing in a solution now will eventually save you time and money.

In Part 1 of this two-part interview, Stéphane Hamel discussed tag management from the perspective of web analytics and implementation. This week he looks into the future and discusses where tag management might be headed.

Q: What’s the future of tag management?

A: Maybe it’s making it even easier for marketers. In my dreams, making it possible to drag and drop pieces of the puzzle. A visual tagger, maybe, that hides all the complexity of the actual code behind it.

                                                                                                     Q: Is there a learning curve when you implement tag management?

A: Yes, like anything else there’s a lot of change management. If the culture of the organization was marketing had to go through IT to change tags, and suddenly marketing can manage the tags themselves, that’s shifting from one place to another. There needs to be some buy-in, some commitment and probably some training also. What I like to do is map a responsibility matrix: who’s responsible, who’s accountable. When you map that for an organization you find no one is actually responsible for tag management. Even if you put tag management in place you need skill sets, someone who knows the intricacies of tagging.

Q: With all these complexities, where’s the benefit, the rainbow?

A: Some people think tag management is going to be a magic solution. It is a good solution, but it’s not magic. Like anything else, it requires effort and commitment. The learning curve, the pain or difficulty you have to go through initially don’t compare to the benefits you’re going to get in the long run. You could go from manual tag management to full deployment in a timeframe of maybe three months. Then you get the benefits, the flexibility, the assurance and higher confidence in the data you’re collecting. You’ll have auditing you never had before.

Google Analytics just introduced track social, we could imagine of Omniture releasing a new version of their library and new features. Now it becomes a lot easier to leverage those new features and still have confidence in your tags.

Q: Can you offer one piece of advice for someone considering tag management?

A: I would start by doing homework and mapping the responsibility matrix. Just doing that may require some political skills. Formalize who is responsible. Is it sitting in the right seat, or should it shift to someone else? Then you can get buy-in from managers that this was sitting in it before, but now we can give some responsibility to marketers.

We caught up with him to discuss tag management in the context of web analytics, organizational change, and implementation best practices.

Q: Where does web analytics intersect with tag management?

A: The interest for tag management is really growing as a way to formalize the process of managing tags. In the past I think TagMan was much more about campaign attribution, how you were going to measure and allocate marketing dollars and make sure you get the right figures. Now I think it’s about how you manage the process of tagging, going back and forth between business and marketing requirements: “here’s what I want to measure,” and IT understanding how to place the tags. There are always little issues and it’s an iterative process. The goal is having good quality data.

One discussion around tag management is that you can get rid of IT. It’s just an illusion.  You need someone in IT to understand how tagging really works.  I think the illusion some people have is that marketing will be able to manage tags by themselves. I don’t think it’s true. Tag management is useful to formalize the process and maybe ease the collaboration between marketing and IT.

I’ve never heard the argument that tag management can eliminate IT, but rather give marketing more autonomy in the process. Is that accurate?

There’s maybe more autonomy, but up to a certain point. The main issues I always see are that as long as you are in the informational part of the website; anything that’s content and usually template-driven, you put the tags in the template. That makes it easier to manage them. When we say IT, it may just be a web developer or web integrator. Those people know about JavaScript, they know how to put the tags on the web page.

So what are the advantages of tag management to marketers?

Tag management  provides greater autonomy to make simple changes, especially if the tags are encapsulated into snippets of code that can be easily embedded. So maybe the marketer doesn’t have to understand everything technically, but knows if they put that on my web page I can be tracking social media or outbound links, for example. If you know you’ve got the right piece of code, the marketer can put it in the tag container and know what they’ll be tracking.

Marketers can have high confidence that if they add something to the tag container it will work. The other advantage is to increase the confidence that the tags are working on every single page of the website. It’s a kind of interesting challenge. I’ve done a lots of website audits and an interesting issue is a page that doesn’t have any tags.  So using a tag management system is not an absolute guarantee you’ll have tags on every page if they weren’t there in the first place.

So it’s not just a matter of deploying tag management. There needs to be an audit to make sure everything is fine when you deploy the tags. Often a 404 page, for example, has no tags. If you deploy tag management and forget to tag that page, it’s an issue.

What steps should be taken to implement tag management correctly?

There’s a need to do an audit to know what is tagged, how it’s tagged, missing tags, what are the various tags being fired? It’s not just a matter of having a Google or Omniture tag on the page, but also ad networks and other tags to be managed. So audit, review the implementation, reassess the business needs so you don’t collect the wrong data or data that is not useful. You want to reassess that.

Configure the various containers that you will need for every type of page. So part of the audit is reviewing the templates. For a checkout process you may have three pages, and one is special, it’s a ‘thank you’ page.  You need a different set of tags on that type of page. Using tag management also makes it easier to have a development QA production setup. You can make sure that when tags are in production they are foolproof.

Next week, in Part 2 of this two-part interview, Stéphane Hamel discusses the future of tag management.

This will save time and money in the way Confused.com runs its online campaigns since the tags on which they rely can be managed through a single online interface rather than through back-end code changes to the site.

Tom Beverley, digital and customer marketing director at Confused.com, said: “With TagMan on our site we can remove a large portion of the time, money and energy we currently spend on tag management and redirect that focus on marketing the business. TagMan will allow us to make changes to campaigns much more effectively and look to use new technologies and suppliers without the significant barrier of tag implementation.”

Tag management has become a major headache for online advertisers, slowing down pages and prompting major problems with implementing and tracking campaigns.

A recent study by TagMan into tag implementation issues found they have caused a loss of website sales for more than a quarter of marketers and a loss of site traffic for almost a third. More than half have lost campaign performance data, delayed the launch of a new campaign and delayed the use of a new technology. More than a third have decided not to use a new marketing technology thanks to the pain of tag implementation and nearly one in five have decided not to launch a new campaign.

Meanwhile, more than 40% spend more than a day a month implementing tags; more than half of businesses incur direct IT costs to implement tags on their sites and almost a quarter (24%) spend more than $1,000 for every tag implementation.

Confused.com is the first price comparison engine to sign up to the system, which is already in use by the likes of Asda Finance, Boden, Subaru and Virgin Atlantic.

About Confused.com
Confused.com is one of the UK’s biggest and most popular price comparison services, generating over two million quotes per month. Launched in 2002, it was the first insurance price comparison website, specialising in car insurance. Confused.com has now expanded its coverage in this product area and can provide quotes for car insurance for women, classic car insurance, and car insurance for young drivers, amongst others.

Confused.com is not a supplier, insurance company or broker. It provides a free, objective and unbiased comparison service. By using cutting-edge technology, it has developed a series of intelligent web-based solutions that evaluate a number of risk factors to help customers with their decision-making, subsequently finding great deals for them on a wide-range of insurance products, financial services, utilities and more. Confused.com’s service is based on the most up-to-date information provided by UK suppliers and industry regulators.

About TagMan
TagMan is the smart container tag for enterprise e-commerce. By acting as a single, independent, universal tag and interface through which tracking tags and pixels can be deployed to an advertiser’s web site, online marketers can save time and money in the way they track campaigns and capture the complete path to conversion. TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has offices in New York and London. Clients include Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Air New Zealand.

TagMan is used to manage online marketing tags/pixels (the pieces of code used by the digital advertising industry to track the performance of online campaigns) – and the data they provide – much more effectively, independently and with more control over privacy. It is used by e-commerce businesses to connect or switch between online marketing technology providers such as data systems, retargeting networks and web analytics providers more freely, and track the entire multi-touch attribution path to conversion of online customers in one system, in real time.

“TagMan was the first tag management system and has established itself as the market leader and trend-setter in both the US and Europe,” says TagMan founder and CEO Paul Cook. “We will put the new funding to immediate use in releasing version 3 of our technology, building out our infrastructure to support the continuing flow of new, enterprise e-commerce clients and to develop the technology so that we can continue to break new ground on behalf of those businesses.”

“Tagman has been very successful in helping e-commerce companies and marketers improve the performance of their online marketing, and this has ancillary benefits for consumers and innovative vendors in the ad tech market,” says Ian Sigalow, partner at Greycroft Partners, who has previously invested in Buddy Media and Collective. “We are very excited about the potential for TagMan’s agnostic and universal solution to the problems presented by tags, pixels, and attribution.

Following the new investment, TagMan has expanded its Board of Directors with three new non-executive appointments: Seth Brody, representing Greycroft, an experienced digital media executive was previously a Group Vice President/GM of online travel agent Orbitz Worldwide; Shaun Gregory, new media director at O2  who also becomes Chairman; and John Taysom, representing Cambridge Angels, a director, founder or investor in several online companies, including Advertising.com.The remaining Board will continue to be comprised of CEO Paul Cook and TagMan General Manager Jon Baron.

Greycroft Partners LCC (www.greycroftpartners.com) founded in 2006, is a venture capital partnership, formed to invest in promising digital media companies.  Greycroft has raised over $200 million and invests between $500,000 and $5 million at inception, and will increase on a staged basis to double that amount over time. Their portfolio companies benefit from active, hands-on assistance in all phases of expansion, including marketing, finance, and management development.

With offices in New York and Los Angeles, the company leverages an extensive network of media and technology industry connections to help investees gain visibility, build strategic relationships, and successfully bring their products to market. A list of its portfolio companies can be found here: Portfolio | Greycroft Partners LLC

iNovia Capital (http://inoviacapital.com/) provides venture capital to entrepreneurs who transform innovations into successful companies. The team comprises sector experts focused on mobile, consumer internet, internet communications, software and digital media.  iNovia has $165 million under management across two seed and early stage IT and Life Sciences funds.

TagMan (www.TagMan.com) is the smart container tag for enterprise e-commerce. By acting as a single, universal tag and interface through which tracking tags and pixels can be deployed, online marketers can save time and money in the way they implement, manage and track campaigns. TagMan goes beyond last-click by capturing the complete path to conversion of online customers and providing real-time attribution reports that alleviate discrepancies between display, CPA and PPC online advertising channels.

TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has offices in New York and London. Clients include Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Air New Zealand. TagMan recently won the DPAC Award as the Best Advertising Analytics company as determined by peers in digital media and marketing.

Reasons to buy:
1. TagMan is in constant development to keep up with the latest technologies that can be served through our container solution and, unless developers are assigned to this process internally, what has been built will quickly fall behind and become redundant.

Example: 3rd party technology suppliers regularly update their tags and this requires both a code change on the site and an update to the tag libraries in the container solution.

2. Legal requirements – the US FTC and the EU are in the process of introducing new legislation to safeguard consumer privacy online, with regard to the use of cookies. The latest regulations in the EU, for example, aim to ensure that users opt in to being tracked. With this in mind, tag management systems have to be either fast to respond or, as in the case of TagMan, already equipped to provide global privacy options in the tool to give the consumer control over how they are tracked.

Example: Discussions are coming to a head on industry self-regulation or ‘do not track’ privacy legislation but the consequences of changes could make a particular tagging system redundant and need changing.

3. Tag management technology is itself advancing rapidly and some of the latest features of the TagMan container (which are the culmination of four years’ technical work) include the ability to:

• Add, edit and delete tags while browsing your own website
• Growing tag library of over 150 tagging technologies
• Define new parameters without touching the code on the site
• Smart loading of tags (so disabling tags that slow down page load times)
• Multi-part tags (this is the ability to wrap code to different parts of a web page for use with MVT tags, for example)
• Server tags
• Global opt-out of tracking for consumers

Example: With sprint launches every four weeks, some of our developments are minor tweaks honed to improve the efficiency of the technology, and some are major releases to provide new functionality – but TagMan never sits still.

In the end, our answer to the buy or build question is that it took our founder Paul Cook – an absolute pioneer in online tracking – four years to come up with the best possible universal container tag and tag management system. He, and a large team of equally talented developers and support staff, work entirely on supporting and improving it. So, is it possible for a business to build its own? Yes. Is it feasible? We would say no.

What do you think of the buy or build argument? Got some examples of where ‘build’ has worked or where ‘buy’ hasn’t? We’re happy to hear from you.

New York, NY – Judged by senior industry peers from the likes of Omnicom, Rapp, Wieden+Kennedy , MediaVest, Online Publishers Association and Return Path; the award represents “the best existing, new or improved analytics and measurement platform innovation to provide metrics and insights for advertisers, publishers, and marketers”. TagMan’s attribution focused technology beat out entrants and finalists, to be judged the clear winner by informed US industry heavy-weights in this exciting sector.

The DPAC Awards honor overall excellence and breakthrough achievement in US digital publishing and advertising. The purpose of the DPAC Awards is to recognize the outstanding efforts being made in digital publishing and advertising.
The award was accepted by Chris Brinkworth, TagMan’s CMO, at the DPAC Gala in New York City on December 9, 2010.