To say that he fully understands web analytics and where the industry is headed is an understatement. We recently caught up with him to discuss how his business is doing, how mobile analytics is growing, and the importance of an independent tag management system.

Jim Sterne at the TagMan Booth at eMetrics New York

We recently caught up with Jim Sterne, the Founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit to talk about what happened at the event in New York and what’s happening in the industry overall.

Q:  What were some of the a-ha moments of eMetrics New York for you this year?

A: We are actually maturing as an industry. More and more presenters are talking about how they are integrating data from multiple data streams in order to drive business strategy instead of lamenting how they wish they could. More senior people are consuming the insights bubbling up from analysts. More analysts are reporting into Finance — a huge step forward. Analysts are moving into more executive senior roles as organizations recognize their unique grasp of the inner workings of the company and the behavior of their customers.

Q: We’re moving into a hyperdata era of real-time analytics and big data. What do you think this will mean for analytics and performance?

A: Analysts and optimization professionals will be even more necessary as even more competitive advantage is mined from hyperdata. The ability to monitor sentiment in real time, the ability to respond to sudden shifts in subject matter interest and the ability to leverage predictive analytics across large datasets will continue to put analysis and performance into the spotlight.

Q: Are you surprised by the growth in tag management in the US since TagMan first made its US appearance at eMetrics DC 2009?

A: I am not surprised by the growth in tag management. One company had a tag management offering at eMetrics in 2008 and attendees were very interested. Everybody I encountered lamented their trials and tribulations with tagging. But that firm was unsuccessful at explaining their solution.

When TagMan appeared, people were hopeful that it would deliver — and it did. Now, tag management is seen as a solution for a clear and present problem and those who are not using it are considered a step behind.

Q: Do you see this growth as a fad or a trend?

A: I see this growth as an inevitability. Why would a company not use a content management system, a web analytics tool, word processing, spell check or tag management?

Q: What are your thoughts on the future of tag management?

A: Tag management is one of those necessities that is so manifestly valuable that it will be folded into digital property development and management systems. These systems will include rudimentary tag management functionality, license third party tools or be deemed substandard.

Jim Sterne is pictured above at the TagMan booth at eMetrics New York. He’s driving the Tag Speedway, where eMetrics participants were given the opportunity to test their own speed at slot cars, test their website speed (courtesy of Catchpoint) and road test TagMan. With TagMan site speed is instantly improved, as our smart tag loading features solve the problem of slow-loading tags through conditional tag loading, parallel tag loading, synchronous tag acceleration, and tag killing.  

It can be hard to believe, but build vs. buy is still a debate in a variety of tech circles. This came to mind recently when we watch a video posted by analytics expert Jason Thompson in which he debates the merits of roll-your-own analytics systems.

Now with digital measurement consultancy Keystone Solutions, Jason is an industry veteran, having worked for companies including Omniture and Spark Networks. We caught up with him to ask if he sees any merit to building in-house tag management systems.

“Buy vs. build really applies to everything. My philosophy is that companies should be investing their time where their talents are, and tag management is no different.  Anyone who’s on the client side and deploying analytics tags or marketing tags – there are so many different tags out there – they start to develop their own tag management. It’s an easy step to take.

“When I was on the client side,  that definitely wasn’t where we had talent. Our talent [at dating site owner Spark Networks] was hooking people up. While we definitely had smart developers and engineers, it didn’t make sense for us to build our own tag management system.  It’s better for them to spend their time building algorithms that match people together.

“There was no way we could possible keep up with everything that’s going on in the space as new tags are being added by vendors, as new technologies are coming into play, there’s just no way we could scale that.

“We may build a fantastic system, but there’s no way we could support that. In six months it’s going to be outdated. We don’t have the resources that a company focusing on doing tag management has. It’s not our business.  It’s simply much better to buy tag management so that as a company we can focus on what our core competency is.”

This is the second of a two-part interview. You can read Part 1 here.

How do you find out your site has a page load performance problem?

There are a number of services out there that provide really complete monitoring of your page load times. Those range from fairly simple services that are often free. They ping your site, or a couple of pages on your site, and tell you about page load times. There are fancy, more sophisticated and comprehensive services that will ping your site from a variety of locations, including international locations, and do it on a regular basis. They’ll give you back reports that tell you which pages on your site are loading, what your average page load times are, and in some ways even more important that average page load times, how much variation there is.

It’s just not the case that there’s a single number that represents how fast your pages load. It varies a lot depending on where people are coming in from, the time of day, what your server volumes are, what pieces of the site they’re trying to access.  There’s not just one number to look at here, but there are a number of services that provide that kind of information and intelligence on an ongoing basis. It’s not super-expensive for the most part. It’s something companies who are serious about their web site would be well rewarded for investing in.

Are all tag management systems created equal when it comes to increasing site performance?

I don’t think so. Tags in general have become a more significant part of the performance problem. Web analytics tags tend to be some of the heaviest tags on pages. As far as  web analytics goes we have a similar temptation to what I spoke about earlier in terms of user interfaces: it’s natural enough to want to include as much functionality as you can, and sometime that leads to fairly weighty tags. Many tag management systems can actually help reduce the burden tags place on your site.

Many of our enterprise clients don’t have just one tag on their site, they often have half a dozen, 10 or 12 tags. That starts to add up. It’s just one piece of the overall page performance equation, but it’s a very controllable piece.

Most tag management systems give you at least some benefits when it comes to tag loading, but there are very significant differences in the way tag management systems are engineered and the way they take advantage of what’s on the page. Some simply load in a tag governance system but they don’t improve the performance that dramatically.

Then there are ways the tag itself can be engineered to actually improve the performance loads. All those things are significant. The bottom line is the faster your tags can load and still do the job, the more room it gives you to play with the user interface and still have fast-loading pages. It’s definitely a win-win situation where if you can make the measurement component really tight and fast, it gives you more opportunities to do things and experiment and build out your page GUIs without impacting page load times.

Any final thoughts?

One thing that I really wanted to talk about in the webinar is what I often see people not pay enough attention to when they think about page load times. People often over-focus on a few pages on the website. There’s the homepage in particular, and then sometimes the shopping cart functionality. Those are vitally important pages, I’m not going to argue against that. But we have seen sites that were good about optimizing those pages but they let significant performance problems creep into other areas of the site. I’m going to present a case study in the webinar of one client who let that happen to their search functionality. Search is a critical intermediate step between the home page and the shopping cart! Yet it’s not something people really measure on an ongoing basis.

One of the points I want to make is to really explain you need to understand a wide variety of page performance issues across your site. Sometimes there are systems within your site, like search, that will perform dramatically differently than the rest of the site. So it’s really important to look at page load times across the spectrum of pages in your site and try to optimize them – and be aggressive about that.

Please register to attend the Sept. 29 webinar.

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 Gary to learn more about what he’ll be discussing, and who should sign up to participate. This is the first of a two-part interview.

Who’s the target audience for this webinar?

That’s a really good question. It’s not always one individual person who’s responsible for page performance. Marketing folks in general are not responsible for the page load times on the site, but they need to be deeply concerned with it.  They’re the critical influencing constituency who need to let the IT side of the house know what they need from a page load perspective. That’s one audience. Those aren’t the people who are charged with making those page load times happen. They’re not on the design side, they’re not on the IT side, or the network side. They’re the people who have a real stake in what happens with the website and whether page performance is going to impact their bottom line, so that’s one natural audience.

There are deep technological issues involved in this issue to and it’s critical for that audience to understand how technology can impact page load times and also how important page load time is to what they’re trying to accomplish.

A second audience I see with tag management issues is increasingly as we look at enterprises evaluating tag management systems what we’ve found out is it’s a little bit different from people who have gone out and looked at web analytics tags. With web analytics tags, generally performance doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. When people are evaluating a tag management system, the IT folks who are heavily responsible for network performance and overall performance of the system are heavily involved in those decisions, so naturally this webinar is intended for those folks, too, to give them a really good sense of what a tag management system can accomplish and what they should think about and look for in terms of technologies that can really drive performance of the page. They’re the people who have to make the technical decision about what will help accomplish those goals.

Really, the webinar is intended for both those audiences: people on the IT side of the house who are thinking about tag management from a technology and a network perspective and really need to understand will it improve page load performance, what can I expect from it, what are the risks and issues? But also for the marketing guys so they understand what the potential benefits are so they can be influencers in that decision.

How much awareness is out there of page load time being potential problem?

I think there’s been a pretty substantial increase in awareness around that. A couple of years back people had gotten a little sloppy about monitoring their page load times. Pages were getting heavier and heavier. But a couple of factors have focused people on the degree to which this is an important problem. A number of studies were released that really suggested slow-loading sites had a significant impact on the conversion rates and satisfaction rates of sites. That got a lot of attention. In general we went through a cycle of web page getting heavier and heavier and heavier, partially because they could. So many people moved to broadband, and broadband rates have been increasing. It’s been a lot easier to load up technology and fancy elements on pages, and an inevitable tendency to do that.

At some point you do hit saturation levels.  Maybe we did go through a cycle of a lot of people had done that then said, “Wait a minute.  My page looks great and is full of fancy stuff, but every time I load it, it takes a heck of a long time.”

There quite a bit of awareness, actually, that it’s a real problem.

It also tends to be one of those problems that can fly under the radar. There’s vivid and immediate benefits to fancy design. People see that and experience that. A lot of the time, the people who are evaluating the website are on really fast internal websites, so they’re not aware of what everyone else is doing.  It’s a problem people are aware of, but it’s still a problem that slips into the background just because the things that challenge it and cause the problem are much more immediate, visual and visceral than problems in performance loading, which are often hidden from the people who have to make decisions about those things.

The interview with Gary will continue next week. Meanwhile, please register to attend the Sept. 29 webinar.

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

Accuracy. A tag management system deploys consistent analytics tags on all pages. Across the board, analytics become more consistent, relevant and accurate.

Efficiency. The ability to add, remove, and edit tags at any point in site development with little to no need for IT involvement means tag management is faster and cheaper.

Freedom. Tag management systems support many tags from multiple applications and can apply these tags to any page. This means enormous flexibility. Site owners can run tags on specific pages, add or remove vendors and agencies, or run proof-of-concept projects.

Restores tag ownership to measurement experts. A tag management system allows the web analytics team to govern tags rather than the IT department. This eliminates process roadblocks and speed analytics initiatives.

Stewardship. Tags can be standardized across all applications, sites, and users. Such consistency supports measurement frameworks, technical best practices, and privacy and regulatory compliance mandates.

Enhanced page load performance. A tag management system reduces page weight to improve page load performance. This can result in significant increases in conversion rates for e-commerce sites.

We encourage you to download the entire Forrest report, How Tag Management Improves Web Intelligence.