Current technologies that track consumers’ behavior when browsing the Web are often dropping cookies on users’ browsers unbeknownst to them (secret data collection). And that’s what’s causing all the alarm and changing tide toward enabling consumers to opt out of being tracked.

For marketers and etailers this movement sounds like a no-win. But it isn’t. As Angus Glover, Chief Privacy Officer at TagMan recently wrote on MarketingProfs:

Through use of tag management and other opt-out mechanisms, marketers can live up to the opt-out promises that various laws and regulations around the world require, while continuing to use tracking systems that do not require such opt-outs. Tags, cookies, data collection, and sharing are at the heart of the privacy problem. By leveraging a system that allows marketers to control all data-driven vendors in one place, they can ensure that best practices are met across the board.

Tag management systems not only help marketers and agencies comply with regulations, independent tag management systems (vendor agnostic platforms) allow marketers to remove or replace vendors (retargeting, social widgets, data collection, tracking, affiliates, analytics, etc.) who don’t meet their privacy policies. With a full universal tag management system, like TagMan, consumers can opt out of third-party behavioral targeting, while still being tracked by first-party site analytics. Marketers can control the data collection process, gain trust from the consumer by offering them to opt out, and still collect relevant data.

Image: By Pininfrna (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Now we’re taking a look at the benefits and shortcomings of each of these tag management solutions in terms of the internal effort required in relationship to whether all vendors are fully supported. (See image above)

As you can see, employing a full enterprise TMS requires the least internal effort with 100% of vendors fully supported. 100% vendor support means you can even manage other types of tags (container and universal), but it doesn’t work the other way around. Meanwhile, near the other end of the scale, a Container Tag solution requires quite a bit of internal effort, but only around half of all vendor tags are supported and they don’t work very well with web analytics. A full TMS ensures campaign and conversion tracking, and most important, a speedy page-load time. Why would you even consider another solution?

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.

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.

We think tag management is becoming a real issue and that the piggy-back solutions only address part of the problem. Would love to hear their thoughts about TagMan, sounds like it could be the solution!

A single TagMan tag can house multiple tagging solutions to de-duplicate all online performance marketing and make the tagging process much simpler. You can track all your marketing channels, natural search included, and compare them side-by-side for response attribution modelling.

Our aim is to make sure TagMan works with all tag based online marketing solutions, including content optimisation and web analytics. Currently we support major vendors like Atlas, DoubleClick and Google Analytics but support can be added easily for all of the tag-based solutions we’ve seen so far.

TagMan fills the gap between Ad Serving, Content Management and Web Analytics. Take control of your online marketing performance…