Google Analytics, A/B testing, remarketing, and pixel tracking for advertising providers – the website of an average company is overwhelmed with additional lines of code to track visitors and optimize their experience. Although all very useful, all of these tags can quickly become difficult to manage effectively. Quite often the management of your website is done externally, so if your company needs to make a quick update to a tag, it may take days or even weeks before the change finally occurs.
The solution to counter this problem and to provide more flexibility or autonomy to your marketing team is a Tag Management System, or TMS. Here are some basic concepts:
A tag is a piece of JavaScript code that is running on the visited page and can perform many functions. Most of the time, the tag sends information to third parties in order to measure specific data for your digital marketing campaign.
Tags use cookies from a user’s browser to follow their navigation paths. In other words, cookies act as a tracker similar to GPS that you wear when you want to measure your running performance.
How does the tag manager work ?
Most often, your website’s code includes a series of tags that function independent of each other. This multiplication of tags reflects a desire to follow the results of different advertising agencies you work with: Adwords, Bing, Yahoo! as well as dynamic retargeting tags like Adacado or Chango, and so on.
Tags may as well be associated to tools installed on your site in order to improve it’s performance. Examples of that would be the Moz tag for SEO or the Optimizely tag for conversion optimization.
With a tag management solution, you can group all these different tags into one. The tag manager’s main function is to act as a “tag container”:
The essence of the tag management is to store different tags in the same place. As opposed to spreading the tags on the pages and the site, a tag manager will require the establishment of one single Tag Container.
Benefits of a Tag Management System
1. Easier tag implementation
While using a tag manager, you can install all the tags directly from the management platform. For example, if you make the decision to launch a Bing Ads campaign, you can simply push the Bing tag live and collecting information is ready to start.
2. Faster page loading times
Once you insert a large number of tags on your website, pages tend to load more slowly. This in effect may have a negative impact on the user’s experience. Since the Google Tag Manager allows you to install a single tag on all pages, as a result the pages will load faster.
3. Better understanding of the user’s behavior on your pages
It is always important to know if the user’s navigation on our website is what we expect it to be. Indeed, sometimes we change a call to action button convinced that this will improve the conversion rates; after a few days we can see that the final effect is not necessarily the desired one. In this case, a tag manager will allow you to setup basic A/B tests to analyze the performance of each variation of buttons on your page.
Contribution: What are your real performance drivers?
Google Tag Manager, a widespread tag manager, allows tags to communicate with each other via Google Analytics. Google Analytics not only plays the role of the moderator, but also allow you to better understand the sources of traffic and their impact on conversion.
The contribution is then in the role played by all the drives involved in a conversion process. Before finalizing the conversion (such as submitting a form or making a purchase), users tend to visit multiple pages on the internet. Each driver will then play a special role in conversion.
Google Tag Manager is what creates the communication between tags as well as between traffic sources, thus it will help you to recreate the history of interactions on your website.
For example, if your social media initiative attracts many users but it does not lead to conversion, it is probably because they are not ready to take a specific action. Other means of communication will then take over the conversion process initiated in social media. In this case, for example, banners designed to enhance brand awareness and PPC will more likely bring the user towards the conversion.
Google Tag Manager is therefore an excellent tool to help you better understand the impact of all conversion drivers and thus to clarify your budget choices while allowing better allocation of your resources. Ready, set, TAG!
Other examples of Tag Manager Systems:
This article was originally written by Guillaume Marchal. Images source: Kaushik.net
