Tag Management Defined
A tag management system (TMS) is a software system designed to streamline both the deployment of JavaScript (JS) and image (img) tags on a website or mobile app and the collection of data by a website or mobile app.
A real-world case for tag management
If a marketer is driving traffic to a website that sells over 10,000 different products, she will most likely want to know the types of products that are being added/removed from the cart, what products, as well as how many orders and how much revenue can be attributed to each channel she uses. Each vendor that she uses may require that a tag be placed on the order confirmation page and other pages on the site.
Not long ago, she would have to send each tag to the web development team along with detailed instructions on where to place the tag as well as the dynamic data to be populated within the tag (such as revenue or a transaction ID). This process caused a lot of headaches for the following reasons:
The developers would have to manually maintain tens, and sometimes hundreds or thousands, of marketing tags on disparate pages of the website. When a site update happens, they must migrate tags and ensure that variables still populate, etc.
The accumulation of these manually-placed tags on the site often slowed down site speed.
Marketers would often have to wait days and weeks before getting a single tag placed as the developers worked through their queue
There's often a communication gap between marketers and developers, so there was always risk of requests getting lost in translation
Enter the tag management system. The goal of the tag management system is to act as the bridge between marketers and developers. The rise of tag management has solved the above problems w
As a centralized system for managing all of these tags, the tag management system has eliminated the need for developers to manually maintain tags within the code on individual pages on the site.
When using a tag management system, tags load asynchronously, resulting in much faster website load times.
Because the tag management system keeps tags in a centralized location hosted in the cloud, it can be accessed and managed by someone who is not a developer. Users can add tags, assign dynamic variables to populate within those tags, and set rules for firing those tags without developer involvement in some cases.
While the communication gap will never be 100% solved, the workflow and collaboration between marketers and developers is greatly improved because everything lives in a centralized platform. Tags can not only be added and tested in seconds, but if a site update requires a tag update, a marketer can search for that tag and then make the required update within the TMS without putting in a request to the dev team!
Tag Management Systems
There are many players in the TMS space, and I will detail what makes each vendor unique in a future post. The major platforms in the tag management space are:
Tag Management Resources
There are many great resources out there for help with implementing and customizing your TMS. Since Google Tag Manager is free and very widely used, most of the free resources are geared toward GTM users. If you're a DIYer or serial learner, I'd encourage you to check out the below:
Engage with Us
We offer tag management consulting. If your have tag management challenges that are beyond your bandwidth and/or expertise, we can help!
