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.

JavaScript tags have become a cornerstone of code for Web analytics, online testing, behavioral targeting, affiliate marketing, ad serving, search marketing, and more. Without an efficient, flexible and adaptive tag management system, managing what can easily become dozens and dozens of individual pieces of code can become, according to a recent report on tag management from Forrester Research:

• A perpetual process
• Expensive
• Flying blind (due to an inability to manage tag status and visibility)
• Error-prone

These problem apply to many, but not all, commercial websites. So how can you tell if your own site is ready for a tag management system?

Forrester has developed an easy, six-step assessment framework to assess website measurement, performance, and management characteristics and evaluate the common drivers of tag management issues. Your total audit score will correlate with their recommendations of where your Web site falls on the spectrum of tag management risk.

Download the report (which is available only for the next four weeks) and take Forrester’s 6-step web site audit to determine if your site needs a tag management system.

image credit: SEG Measurement

A good question, yet one many marketers, web analytics and IT departments are ill equipped to answer. To help them address this critical question, Forrester Research has developed a six-point tag audit and tag management scorecard to help all parties involved determine their level of tag management risk.

The audit poses questions regarding the number of tags on a site, the time and frequency involved in changing or updating them,  and the number of parties involved in the tag management process.

The simple audit is included in Forrester’s report How Tag Management Improves Web Intelligence. Feel free to download the report and receive step-by-step instructions to audit your own tag management needs.

Bryan Eisenberg

Speaker, best-selling author, columnist, digital marketing pioneer and more, Bryan Eisenberg has become something of a legend as a digital marketing pioneer, web metrics guru, and all around advocate of digital marketing best practices.

He’s also is the newest member of TagMan’s advisory board (see seperate press release). We sat down with him to discuss why he feels the tag management issue is an important one now, and what role he’ll play in moving the company forward.

Q: Why focus on this company at this time?

Bryan Eisenberg: A couple of issues. There’s several things that TagMan does is that are at the forefront of what marketers are concerned about. One of them is attribution management and the other big one is that people keep hearing they have to add robustness to their websites. “It’s just one more tag, it’s just one more tag.” People are getting tagged out, and this is a company that’s found a solution to deal with that. Getting anything changed on a website is challenging today. To get testing done you have to add these functionalities. When you have something that can eliminate one more frustration from the battle that marketing has with IT, it’s a good thing.

 Q: You’re deeply involved in web metrics and you’re a founding member of the Web Analytics Association. Does that play a role in your association with TagMan?

Eisenberg: Oh, definitely. That’s where my first battles in dealing with any kind of JavaScript tags really came in. Of course, you’re also looking at all the social plug-ins today. Publishers are adding ad features. It’s all become one thing after another. And it’s all focused on getting the data. This can help you with attribution as well as the management of all those tags.

Q: Let’s talk about attribution and why it’s so important to accomplish that task.

Eisenberg: Most people haven’t been aware of the attribution issue until really recently when Google began really talking about it, saying they were going to have their search funnel and their multichannel funnel. So people started getting the idea that it might be important. I still see very few people actually using it.

I remember we really started understanding the link between search and keywords and attribution about eight years ago.  One of our clients had a very broad term that never, ever, ever converted. Ever. So he decided he was going to shut it off. The following two weeks, his sales were down 30-something percent. He realized that what had happened was earlier on people were starting to recognize his brand, then later on in the search funnel he was showing up again, and they had confidence he was showing up and knew what he was talking about.

There’s no way for him to easily credit that earlier. He didn’t have a solution.

Q: Between all the things a tag management system can do: attribution, website optimization, even do-not-track compliance, what do you feel is the most important or vital?

Eisenberg: I don’t think we can narrow it down to one. Tag acceleration makes it important. But really it’s pain points, and where the market is. The nice thing is it’s one solution that has multiple purposes. That’s very valuable, as opposed to buying three different solutions from three different companies for three different problems. I’m always a big fan of that.

 Q: How aware do you think the market is of tag management as a problem? Is the market ready for this solution, or is it a year too early?

Eisenberg: This is one place where I think the U.S. lags behind the rest of the world. In Europe there’s been a lot more discussion about tags and cookies, privacy laws in general. People here haven’t been made as aware of it, plus there’s a lot more people in this market. It’s not mainstream, but it certainly will become so. One thing I’ve definitely learned is the second Google starts focusing on something and rings the bell, the more people actually catch on to it. They just did multichannel funnels, I think that’s going to help educate marketers. They’ll learn very basic stuff and they’ll want more.

Q: Talk a little about how you hope to personally contribute to TagMan.

Eisenberg: One of my main goals is the same goal I’ve had since Day 1: helping marketers become more efficient at their marketing efforts. Part of that is through education. One of the first things I started discussing with TagMan was showing them interesting research studies we should be taking a look at. We need to learn what marketers are talking about and what they’re interested in, and if we have to bring them in via their own interests, we’ll do that. We’ve seen that in some of the research that’s been coming out the past couple of weeks, such as the one on social plug-ins and another on Internet retailers and page speed.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to add to what we’ve discussed?

Eisenberg: For the most part, lots of American companies have trouble accepting companies from abroad as leaders. Apart from a couple of Israeli companies, like ICQ, U.S. marketers have not been accepting of international companies. A lot of them are innovating far beyond what we’re doing here in the States. Some issues have occurred there before they occurred here, like page management issues. TagMan has a track record, they’ve worked with big companies in the U.K. This isn’t something you just piece together.

image courtesy of Catchpoint

The slow-loading Google+ plug-in that significantly drags page load time just got a jump start.

Google has announced a news set of tools it claims will make the button render up to 3X faster. Indeed, data from our friends at Catchpoint are showing significant improvement in load time – if not quite as much as Google claims.

Even if the +1 button does load twice as quickly as before, it’s important to bear in mind that in aggregate, social plug-ins can significantly reduce page load speed.

To prevent tags from slowing down the page, you can configure TagMan to writes out into an iframe instead of directly into the page.  The advantage of writing tags out into an iframe is they will not delay the page from completing like Javascript does.  If the business logic dictates that no 3^rd party tags need to be served, minimal code is sent back to the page, keeping bandwidth to an absolute minimum and reducing the impact on page download speed.  However, if page weight remains an issue you can always store a lightweight configuration in TagMan that you can roll back to in case of an emergency.

TagMan can claim to be fully comprehensive because it can deploy other piggy-back solutions, whereas you can’t use them to deploy TagMan!

Mix this with the fact it can deploy javascript based tag solutions, de-dupe based on post impression click or view activity and set conditional first/last click rules for completed actions and comprehensive is very much the word.

Also, because tags are launched via TagMan, should a particular vendor tag be slowing page load it can easily be removed at the click of a button through the TagMan interface rather than having to ask the webmaster to remove it.

Or even better, how about being able to set an end date against a vendor tag so that it’s automatically removed without you having to remember to remove it or do anything else.

TagMan will save you time. Being in control of the tagging process means that there will be fewer mistakes and improved accuracy, now that’s got to be a good thing……….