All About Tag Management Software

About halfway through the first Hunger Games movie, right before our protagonist Katniss is about to enter the arena, a stern-looking official injects something into her arm.

"What's that?" asks the ever-suspicious Katniss.

"A tracker," is the brusque reply."

The tracker, which is injected into all 24 Hunger Games contestants, monitors the players' exact location within the arena, keeps track of their physical condition and prevents them from leaving. This data is monitored remotely from the Game Master's control room.
 
Before you can understand Tag Management Software, you need to understand what a "tag" is, in the context of digital advertising.

A tag is a script that you place on a web page to capture information about visitors. When a tag loads (read - fires), it sends that information back to an ad server for further analysis.

Did you know - tags are typically snippets of JavaScript code but once upon a time they were transparent 1x1 pixels. When a user loads a webpage, the tag "fires," sending a packet of data to the server.

Web advertising tags serve a similar purpose, except for the fact that they involve much less gore and don't really care about your physical condition. Rather than your body being injected with a physical tag, it's your browser that's actually injected - but with a code.

Sometimes it's better to show than to tell, so here's a rough idea of how tags work:
 
Tags are used to track digital ads performance. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google supply tags to their advertisers to place on their websites. This enables the advertisers to track campaign performance.

Similarly, you must have definitely noticed how trackers work in the Hunger Games. Similarly, tags enable advertisers to follow users around after they've clicked on an ad. They collect and store customer data, validate various functionality like targeted ad messaging based on user behavior and record users' actions, so advertisers can see how effective their ads are (e.g., did they motivate a user to click, sign up for an email, purchase a product, etc.?)

Here's an example of what a Facebook tag looks like:


Most websites have more than one tag installed because they're running ads at multiple places. Remember, each platform and website require its own tag; so, if you're running ads on Bing, Google, Twitter and Facebook, you'll need to run four tags, all at once.
 

• Pro tip

  A tag from an external source like Facebook is called a third-party tag (Facebook is the third-party in this case). Facebook's ad server serves your ad, when a user clicks on it and visits your website, its tag monitors that and captures the user's action. It sends information back to the ad server so they can serve similar ads in the future.
  
  Imagine if there were multiple Game Masters in the Hunger Games, requiring multiple trackers to be injected into each contestant. Katniss would soon be full of trackers, potentially disrupting or overshadowing the data each tracker could collect. The trackers might even make her sick, causing blood poisoning or even slowing her pace down. In essence, impacting her overall performance.

This exact thing can happen when you add a bunch of tracking tags to your website.

Having multiple tags on your website can cause data layer errors and slow down activities, not because the tags are large files but because each tag you add to your site generates an HTTP request from the third-party server which is dependent on the ad server's response. This tends to clog the so-called virtual arteries.

Do you want to know more about Tag Management Software? Well, the next section is all about that #keepscrolling.

What Is A Tag Management Software?

Tag Management Software (TMS) like Google Analytics Tag Manager helps website owners manage multiple tags. They're focused on two main tasks:
 

• Manage Your Tags In One Place

  Tag Management Software lets you add, edit and manage all your tags in one place, eliminating the need to do this manually, page by page, on your website.

• Combine Your Tags Into A Single Javascript Request

  TMS enables tags to be loaded separately from the rest of your website, eliminating the issue of slower load time (e.g., less drag on those arteries). Tag Management System typically employ a simple, browser-based interface, eliminating the need for website owners to hire programmers to implement new tags or revise and remove old ones.

TMS doesn't help with reporting - you need a web analytics system in place for that. Their function is solely to focus on enabling website owners so as to easily manage, monitor and update multiple tags. There are many TMS available these days but before we get into that, let's take a trip down memory lane.
 
Fun fact 1 - One study found that the average load time for sites with tags was about 9.5 seconds versus 2.7 seconds when tags were disabled. Now, consider that the average enterprise website has between 50-150 third-party tags. That's kind of jaw dropping, isn't it?

Let's dive into the history of Tag Management Software.
 

A Brief History Of Tag Management Software

Tags were introduced to help marketers track digital ad performances. That's a good thing! However, what started as something relatively simple - placing a 1x1 pixel image file on a few pages of your website - has grown into data chaos.

Here's a brief timeline of how Tag Management Software evolved:
 

• 1990s

  Third-party tags were introduced to help advertisers track their digital ad campaigns. Remember we mentioned that they were actual 1x1 pixels back then and were typically placed within the header section of a website.

• Late 1990s, Early 1980's

  Container tags were developed to help manage the proliferation of tags, most of which had evolved from image pixels to JavaScript code snippets. Tag containers solved the problem of managing multiple tags... (sort of). They were unable to handle complex tags and page performance still was getting negatively impacted by too many third-party tags.

• No One Knows Exactly When

  Piggybacking or "chain" tags were introduced into the digital marketing ecosystem, as a way for one ad server's tag to invoke tags from another ad server. This allowed multiple tags to retrieve data collectively, rather than individually. The main drawback to this was it lacked transparency for the website owners. They don't know who is pulling data from their site, plus this approach cloged up the arteries because of all the ad server requests.

• Mid-to-late 2000s

  Tag Management Software entered the scene. Google Tag Manager was introduced in October 2012 to help website owners consolidate their tags and manage them from one interface. The tool was free, of course.

You know the history now, don't you? Let's look at how these Tag Management Software work.
 

How Does Tag Management Software Work?

There's a varied range of Tag Management Software but they just have only one main purpose - to make it easier to implement and organize your tags. Let's check out a few of the most popular Tag Management Software, in no particular order.
 

• Google Tag Manager

  It's free, it's easy to use and it's from Google! It lets you add and update Google ads and third-party tagging without the pesky need to edit code.

• Tealium IQ

  Powers 25% of the top 100 retailers, according to their own press release. Tealium is for high-volume complicated websites (think Fingerhut and U.S. Auto Parts). Tealium IQ tag management is an enterprise-sized tool built by a company that's all about data.

• Signal Tag Management

  Signal's TMS (formerly called BrightTag) is integrated into their data platform, Fuse, so it's free for its existing users. This is another enterprise sized TMS but since there's no standalone version, you're out of luck if you're a small business that just needs tag management without bells and whistles.

"Necessity is the mother of invention," as the saying goes. Now that you understand the procedure, it's time to consider why these solutions were created in the first place. Excited? Let's get started!
 

Why Do We Need Tag Management Software?

Tag Management Software are an essential ingredient in today's complex digital advertising environment. These help with tag implementation, agility, management and control.

Top benefits of a TMS are:
 

• Improved Website Performance

  Allows asynchronous tag loading, meaning your website loads separately from the marketing tags, eliminating the issue of slow loading pages.

• Less Reliance On IT

  Helps you to easily update, add and manage tracking tag from one interface without the need for manipulating your website's code.

• Efficiency And Cost Effectiveness

  You can manage multiple tags in one place. That's the beauty of these solutions. This saves time, helps reduce errors and increases the effectiveness of the third-party tag themselves.

• Improved Data Integrity

  Enables you to keep tags relevant, debug them and onboard new tag templates quickly, ensuring you collect the high-quality data needed by digital marketer to understand your visitor's behavior and marketing campaigns.

Digital marketers depend on vendor tags to track campaign performance accurately and understand what's working and what's not. In short, they're blind without tags.

It's time to unbox the future of Tag Management Software.
 

Future Of Tag Management Software

Tag management is only one component of the overall digital advertising landscape (though, admittedly, a critical one). For now, TMS aren't going anywhere but that may change as the way we collect data evolves. Tags can only monitor the activity on websites, not the actions people take offline or the information in a phone call or what happens when people interact with IoT devices or ads that run on connected TV.

Soon, the data tags collect will be part of a bigger picture, telling the story of your customers and prospects, including CRM, transactional and offline data.

Simplified data interfaces, easier data collection and universal data standards are expected to play a role in the future of TMS. Right now, Tag management is essential for advertisers and website owners but that may not be the case in the future where data from digital analytics is aggregated, accessible and ultimately centralized into one unified platform. (Phew... too much to catch up on in the future!)