Tag Management – What it Means for Your Business

Tag Management is not something that you would have heard 5-6 years ago. Today, however, it is the subject of many strategic discussions. In fact, just recently, Forrester published an Understanding Tag Management Tools And Technology report exploring this field. In this blog post, we will take a closer look at what tag management is, how companies can benefit from the tag management tools and the ROI of implementing tag management in the organization.

Tag Management – Overview

Different marketing and web analytics services like Google Analytics or Google AdWords use page tagging to collect data about website visitors and website usage. Quite often a website will have 5, 10, 15 and even more tags collecting various marketing information. The average enterprise website may have up to 150 third-party tags on a site at any given time. Managing these tags individually can be very time consuming and inefficient activity that can lead to errors.

Tag management systems address these common challenges and allow users to effectively add, edit or remove tags from the website. Tag mangement saves money as markerters can make changes to the tags without help from the IT department. So how does this technology work?

1. 1. Tag management tool adds a tag container to your page that you can populate with different tags.

1. 1. This container is managed through an interface that makes it easy to assign tags, collect performance statistics and share information.

Tag Management Efficiency

The number one advantage is the reduction in time and increase in efficiency. Below is a chart that was published in the Q2 2012 Global Tag Management User Online Survey by Forrester Research, Inc. As the majority of companies who participated in the survey made some kind of changes to their tags at least once a month, the difference in how much time the implantation took place pre and post-TMS is drastic. On average, the time for implementing a new tag dropped from weeks to less than an hour.

Benefits of Tag Management

1. 1. The ability to manage tags without the help of the IT department.
   2. Shortened time to manage tags by the staff.
   3. Easily enabled privacy tools.
   4. Ability to see all the tags on your site and ensure that they adhere to technical best practices.
   5. Improved page load time by consolidating the variabales used in your tags.
   6. Enforces tag standardization

Tag Management Tools

There are a number of tag management tools available on the market. In 2007, TagMan was the first company to launch the first holistic management system that could work with any tag. According to TagMan, today there are over 15 tag management systems and 800+ vendors. In fact, here is a great Infographic about the history of tags. Here is a brief list of companies that provide tag managment systems:

• • TagMan

• • Tealium

• • Satellite

• • OpenTag

• • Super Tag

• • Bright Tag

• • Ensighten

• • Adobe TagManager

Additional Research

If you are interested in learning more about Tag Management, there are two excellent reports that can help:

1. 1. Econsultance Tag Management Buyer’s Guide
   2. Forrester Understanding Tag Management Tools and Technologies

If you would like to learn more about implementing tag management in your organization, send us a message.

Blog post written by Michael Loban