The digital world is complicated and website tags sit at the heart of online businesses and marketing. In fact, effectively managing website tags, or tracking pixels, is fundamental to digital marketing.
In the ROI of Tag Management, a new report released today in partnership with Tealium, we explore the role, challenges and opportunities for technology in handling vendor website tags.
The tracking pixel enables communication between vendors and websites and is key to most digital marketing technologies. Site analytics, optimization and personalization all depend on them, and while these technologies provide valuable data and capabilities, they also create complexity and work for the marketing department.
The ROI of Tag Management Report looks at one of the rare opportunities to increase ROI and simultaneously simplify life for the marketer, while giving them greater control over digital assets.
Tag management systems (TMS) were developed to counter a number of challenges, especially those brought about by the reliance on technology department resources. Survey respondents cited the top issues with manual tagging, including:
- Delays in implementation as the tech department is overworked
- Product and site development is slowed
- Tag implementation is often incomplete
- Tags slow down the website
What are the benefits of managed tag implementation?
The complexity of the digital world is increasing as data-driven tools infiltrate most levels of digital marketing. Tag management gives marketers greater control over the chaos. The respondents to the Tag Management ROI Survey highlighted the benefits of moving from manual to managed implementation:
-
Tag management saves money as marketers can swiftly make changes to vital assets without enlisting the help of the IT department. Less people and less time means less cost.
-
Time to market is dramatically reduced. 70% of tag management system (TMS) users create and modify tags in less than a work day with almost half of them reporting it takes them less than an hour. Compare that to the industry standard of over a week for manual implementation, and you can see how significant a managed system can be.
-
The marketing department can be more agile which releases the IT/ Tech department for higher level tasks.
-
Website speed is increased as multiple tags are replaced with the single universal tag of the tag management system.
- Privacy tool are easily enabled site-wide which will be key as privacy concerns begin to force marketing technologies to offer "do-not-track" options.
To find out how tag management can benefit the work that you do, download our ROI of Tag Management report, created in association with Tealium. This comprehensive survey will help you better gauge the industry's attitudes around perceived value, critical challenges, important vendor considerations and more.
Some of the top findings from the report have been captured in this infographic:
Reader comments (6)
Head of Technology at London & Partners
9:56AM on 17th May 2012
I get the increase in marketing agility you get by implementing a tagging system, but I'm struggling to see where the site speed improvement comes from as all the tags still have to be served in order for them to function. A good Javascript developer (we are lucky enough to have one) can optimise the placement to minimise the effect on page loads, but can an automated system do as good a job of this ?
10:11AM on 17th May 2012
I must admit, I'd never heard of tag management systems before. Nice infographic.
10:59AM on 17th May 2012
Love a good infographic. Tags are essential to understanding the success of your marketing messages.
11:26AM on 17th May 2012
Tag management fixes one primary issue i.e. governance. It doesn't overcome the fundamental issue, which is that you needed to know what it is you wanted to know up-front and then you still go and tag for it, albeit inside a tag management system. Take a look at a white paper on The Future of Digital Measurement and Personalization which discusses the challenges associated with this approach and which discusses some of the new collection engines out there such as Celebrus technologies, which is a whole new way to capture complete, accurate online behaviour data in real-time, without JavaScript tags/variables etc. http://semphonic.com/content/white-papers/the-future-of-digital-measurement-and-personalization-white-paper.aspx?utm_source=smc&utm_medium=gary's-blog&utm_campaign=celebrus-whitepaper
9:24AM on 18th May 2012
I tried to think so, but I found it was not as the same in the actual process. As you mentioned, I still have doubts, but really thank you for sharing!
1:02AM on 19th May 2012
@Gareth the performance benefits are significant with a TMS. I'm not sure about all TMS's out there, but I'm a client of Ensighten and I can that say for certain about them. They auto-minify, auto-gzip compress, tag-compile, and finally cache the tag code that gets delivered which is then loaded asynchronously in real time without slowing down the page download to the user at all. Its the best of all scenarios and makes a world of difference -- SO much faster than installing everything manually as we had before. Sony was an early client of theirs and last year measured an 18x ROI just from using Ensighten in this way, fyi, and we're predicting similar results on our end. TMS's FTW! =)
Log in to post a comment