'Net Features : tag management

Tealium on the Move; Digital Marketers Turn to Tag Management

Michael Garrity — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:08:00 GMT

Enterprise tag management company Tealium has recently established turnkey integration with 500 different digital marketing vendor tags, giving them the industry’s largest ecosystem of technology vendors.

For Tealium’s customers, this means they’ll be able to deploy “nearly any major digital marketing solution” on their websites faster and easier than ever. This can include everything from analytics to search marketing solutions and beyond, which can be embedded right into a customer’s digital platform through a snippet of software code known as a tag.

The real benefit of these tags, however, is that they let marketers streamline complexity and increase agility by implementing these tag-based solutions on their own, without ongoing IT resource requirements. Before the emergence of tags, marketers mostly had rely on their companies’ IT staffs to integrate JavaScript code into their channels, but with Tealium, they’re given point-and-click, drag-and-drop simplicity that allows them to insert the code all on their own, thus moving the whole process along much faster and smoother.

Tealium’s huge vendor marketplace now offers customers “nearly every type of solution,” including analytics, affiliate marketing, optimization, display advertising, email, search marketing, marketing automation, retargeting, mobile and more.

Tag Management for Non-Techie Digital Marketers

Michael Garrity — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:44:00 GMT

Real-time tag management system provider Ensighten wants to bring the ability to efficiently and accurately set up and manage dozens of tags across a website to even the least technically inclined marketers, which is why the company just launched its new Visual Tagger solution.

Despite the many benefits touted by tag management systems, some digital marketers and site optimization professionals have struggled to execute testing and targeting campaigns when they are required to tag pages with testing code and don’t have the technical background to do it. However, with the release of Visual Tagger, users can deploy Adobe Test & Target and Webtrends Optimize campaigns without updating any code.

All they have to do now is visit a Web page, launch the Visual Tagger through a browser bookmarklet and then define “as many test campaigns as they would like,” which includes identifying the testing locations, setting targeting criteria, passing along essential information, review all tags deployed, debugging any issues and more.

This will help “non-technical users” create a website data layer that improves the consistency and accuracy of visitor, browser and page data collection, while enhancing marketing optimization thanks to more refined data. It will also simplify event tracking, as marketers and analysts merely need to visually identify page elements to track and the events they want to pay attention to, and Visual Tagger’s built-in Adobe SiteCatalyst and Webtrends Analytics integration can easily map the analytics code for those events.

Visual Tagger is currently available for all Ensighten Manage customers at no additional cost.

Is Tealium Taking Tag Management to the Next Level?

Michael Garrity — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:05:00 GMT

Tealium, the tag management solution provider, has been working hard over the last few months to help “move the needle” and evolve the rapidly growing tag management space with a slew of new additions to its core product, including mobile tagging, the Tealium DataCloud and a new multi-CDN architecture.

Going Mobile
The first of these initiatives were the company’s new mobile tagging capabilities that were released last November. While the company now enables marketers to manage tags on mobile websites, which work in much the same way as they do on traditional websites, the bigger initiative is the inclusion of a mobile application tagging option that allows marketers to better manage their marketing solutions and analytics without ever having to recertify their apps. All they have to do is implement the Tealium iQ tag management solution into the app.

Mobile app tagging presents users with support for the “most popular” native environments, including iOS and Android, as well as conditional tag loading that allows them to control which tags will load on specific screens within the app and event-based tracking that deploys tracking links and other events in the app. And as a nice bonus, Tealium’s customers never have to bother updating Tealium iQ once it is integrated into the application.

Big Solution to Big Data
Since then, the company has launched the Tealium DataCloud, a new add-on service that will extend the value of Tealium’s tag management capabilities. To do this, the DataCloud will make it easier for digital marketers to manage the exchange of data between third-party vendors by giving them a raw feed of their rich data stored in a centralized location.

This helps marketers uncover what Tealium CEO Jeff Lunsford called the “Holy Grail” of big data, which is “to have one common database with all of their customer information,” making this solution ideal for companies with multiple locations and/or properties. So, with the DataCloud, Tealium customers will be able to create powerful, visitor-level profiles that will ultimately help improve their customer acquisition campaigns.

But that’s not all that the DataCloud does; it also adds the ability to handle non-JavaScript tagging environments (i.e. Google Checkout) that don’t accept the JavaScript tags that many vendors use. In other words, companies can now deploy mission-critical third-party tags across their entire e-commerce environments, whether they support JavaScript or not.

All of the data gathered by the Tealium DataCloud can be imported into various big data platforms, business intelligence platforms or third-party reporting tools, including AgilOne, Anametrix, Tableau Software and Quantivo.

Reinforcing the Foundations of CDN Architecture
Finally, Tealium’s other big announcement was its move to a new multi-CDN (or content delivery network) architecture to provide its customers with optimal performance, thus making Tealium the fastest tag management delivery network currently available.

This new CDN architecture contrasts Tealium’s old single-CDN approach through Limelight Networks. The main reason for making the change was to better service its clients’ tags to vendors around the world by increasing their speed and redundancy rates. To do this, they’ve started to use CDNs from Akamai Networks and Edgecast Networks.

The performance of each Tealium CDN will be monitored across 30 global regions every 10 minutes to show the best and most up-to-date performing networks. Already, this new approach as been able to shave approximately 100 milliseconds off of the company’s CDN performance, a number that Lunsford says shows a “very noticeable difference” for its customers, improving e-commerce conversion rates and time-on-site and page view metrics for content providers.

The Next Big Thing
Tag management is being heralded by some as the next big thing in digital marketing, and it has certainly proven to be a useful tool for those marketers that have already embraced it. With these new improvements, Tealium is sure to help take the industry to the next level. Will this be enough to convert new customers?

The Future of Search: SEO Trends for 2013

Michael Garrity — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:15:00 GMT

Two weeks from today marks the New Year (assuming the world doesn’t end on Friday). And while the Web has changed dramatically over the last half-decade, there remain a handful of constants that seem as if they will always, in 2013 and beyond, play an important role for Web professionals in developing an Internet strategy, regardless of the industry they operate in. One of those areas is search engine optimization.

However, just because SEO is still going to be necessary in 2013, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same old song-and-dance that Internet marketers are used to. This year saw the emergence of new trends into mainstream SEO practices (at least as “mainstream” as they can be) that will continue well into 2013 and beyond. Let’s take a look at seven of the most important SEO trends for the upcoming year.

Mobile Search
It’s starting to feel as if mobile has been an “emerging trend” since the iPhone was released five years ago. But now that hundreds of millions of smartphone users are being added every year and there is increased diversification in the growing tablet market. Thus mobile search is no longer a novelty that only the most highly trafficked sites will have to optimize for. Blogs and websites must be prepared for mobile searches and mobile capabilities, as their owners will start to see more-and-more of their traffic coming from these devices; this can include practices like including mobile-specific Web formatting.

Google+ and Google Authorship
Look, there’s no use in skirting around the fact that Google is the undisputed leader in the search engine market, and as such, it has the ability to force the hands of Internet marketers to appeal to it to improve their overall SEO efforts. In 2013, expect that pandering to be done through Google+ and the Google Authorship program (where authors identify a page or post as their own work by linking it to their G+ accounts), both of which are likely going to become more important in the search engine’s rankings. What this means is that if you’re not on Google+, either as a brand or an individual (especially if you write a lot of content/blog posts), it’s time to seize the opportunity.

Title Tags and Headings
These pieces of data have always been one of the most basic and important aspects of SEO. What is different now is the information that Google (and probably other search engines) is going to look for when indexing title tags and headings on articles. In 2013, the focus will be on titles and article headings that specifically relate to content or keyword-based content. When applicable, publishers should always break up their content into different sections and have each one CLEARLY address a specific topic.

Quality Content
It seems a bit obvious to say that search engines are on the lookout for “quality content,” which can include traditional content like blog posts, but also links or site design. But what that really means in 2013 is that publishers are not going to get anywhere repurposing, reusing or aggressively distributing the same material over and over again. A large quantity of content is basically useless lengthy, detailed, specific and, perhaps most importantly, unique. It’s time for Web pros to put their creative hats on, because they’re going to have to produce a lot of new, quality content in 2013 if they want to stay competitive.

Tag Management
Tag management is the practice of adding metadata keywords assigned to a piece of information or content on the Web that describe the item and make it easier to find when users search for it. The next step for marketers will be to concentrate their efforts on managing multichannel tags, and thanks to a relatively recent expansion, there are several great tag management services out there that can help them do just that, including BrightTag, Tealium and TagMan.

The Human Touch
For some reason, Google has often been criticized for being too inhuman. Its one-size-fits-all algorithm was susceptible to black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing or low-quality content farms for far too long, but as the Web progresses and becomes more social, Google and other search engines are finally able to completely disregard those cheap techniques in favor of a more human element that will determine how websites and pages rank in their search results. Humanized rankings are going to be far more prevalent over the next year, incorporating more quality content and social media data to deliver results in real-time (or closer to it, at least). So, if you were relying heavily on taking advantage of Google’s impersonal algorithm, it’s time to devise a new strategy.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion rates are no longer just important to your bottom line. There are plenty of websites out there that are well-optimized for certain niches in search engines, but don’t offer the kind of quality product or service needed to actually make a conversion, meaning some of the higher-ranking sites for these keywords are actually useless for searchers. By relying more on conversion rates than search traffic when ranking websites, search engines will be able to provide more quality (there’s that word again) products or services to interested users. If you need some help getting started with CRO, take a look at Website Magazine’s Master List of Conversion Optimization Software.

2013 is right around the corner, and that means now is a great time to re-orient your Web strategy, reconsider your SEO practices and make the next year the most successful yet for your Web business.

Google Tag Manager Released

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:41:00 GMT

Google has released Tag Manager, a free tool that replaces the often clunky and extensive number of tags that are placed on a website for the purpose of remarketing, analytics, etc.

By adding a single snippet of code, users can manage every tag (mostly third-party tags) from one web interface, adding and updating independently of editing or rewriting the code (or bothering IT).

Features of Google Tag Manager include asynchronous tag loading (tags load faster without slowing down the user-visible part of the page), tag templates (making it easy to add custom tags), error prevention tools, user permissions and multi-account funtionality. Google is even providing a tag vendor program for technology companies interested in including a template for their own tag.

There are numerous companies offering tag management solutions - From Tagman to Tealium. With such an enormous Webmaster community and a free product however, it's hard to imagine that any enterprise could compete - but count on the fact that they'll most certainly try.

The Perks of Tag Management

Michael Garrity — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:00:00 GMT

There aren’t many ways to simultaneously improve the efficiency and performance of your marketing, analytics and tracking systems. That is, unless you’re one of the growing number of Web companies adopting a tag management system (TMS) to implement and maintain the data collection instrumentation of modern analytics and marketing execution.

The pace and volume of tag management requirements have increased considerably and often threaten to stretch a businesses time and resources past its limits. Fortunately, a TMS can consolidate tag execution and maintenance into a single management application with added efficiency, flexibility and page-load performance benefits.

A recent study by Forrester, “Understanding Tag Management Tools and Technology,” highlights these advantages in a survey of 76 TMS users. What it found was that these systems are great for businesses with complex Web environments that are constantly changing, leverage tags for a variety of purposes, resist external support in favor of internal resources and/or lack rigorous processes, relying primarily on ad hoc tag additions and maintenance.

According to the report, 50 percent of the respondents are recent adopters, using their current TMS for under a year. (Another 29 percent have had theirs for less than two years.) And while tag management is usually associated with Web analytics, these companies have found creative ways to utilize it.

Nearly 88 percent use their TMS for Web analytics, but many also use it for search marketing (64 percent), ad serving (62 percent), affiliate marketing (59 percent), behavioral targeting (50 percent) and much more. Interestingly, 38 percent of the respondents said their marketing departments were responsible for tag management, while only 28 percent left it to their Web analytics group.

Forrester found that many TMS users “have high expectations for tag management systems,” such as condensed cycle times for adding or changing tags, faster page-load times and reduced technical skill requirements for managing tags. It seems to work, because after deploying a TMS, their ability to implement or revise tags jumps from 18 to 80 percent in a day.

This improved efficiency reduces the effort, resources and time required to add, edit and remove tags from sites. The majority of users (53 percent) said that it takes them less than an hour to implement revise a tag using a TMS, but just eight percent could do it that fast before they got one. In fact, most (52 percent) said it took them between several days and several weeks to add or edit tags until they got a TMS. Luckily, there has been an explosion of specialist and enterprise tag management vendors entering the market.

This includes major software names like Adobe and IBM, who use TMS capabilities to expand their product lines, manage data collection for their product suites and improve the manageability and cohesiveness of their solutions. As established vendors, they appeal to firms that are already deeply invested in their products, because for the most part, their tag management systems lack independence.

Some systems are considered “pure plays,” meaning they focus solely on offering highly functional and easy-to-use tag management systems. These include names like BrightTag and Tealium and are ideal for younger, analytics-led organizations still developing their support and infrastructures – and credibility.

Finally, Forrester identifies TMS marketing platforms like DC Storm and TagMan that develop solutions that support marketing capabilities. A TMS marketing platform provides broad, marketing-oriented perspectives that are great for advertisers or publishers.

Forrester does want businesses to look beyond basic features to find the important differences between vendors. This means looking at capabilities on three different levels. The first is their technical foundation, which consists of the underlying design, operation and delivery of the system, such as its infrastructure, deployment method, implementation method and support and services. Next is the application feature set, or the key components beyond functionality that drive efficiency, such as its partner ecosystem, workflow and user administration capabilities, usability and native reporting features. Last, but not least, is extensibility, which lets users leverage TMS features in multiple environments, so companies should look at environment support, platform extensions and application programming interface.

Ultimately, Forrester’s study seems to definitely point toward using a TMS to the benefit of various aspects of your Web business. Marketers continue to feel pressured to keep up as digital channels become central to customer experiences, and they’ll (likely) find that a good TMS will deliver on its promise of efficiency, helping them save time and resources normally allotted to the exhausting task of adding, editing and removing site tags. However, it is important to look closely at the vendor options available. Businesses have a wide selection of prices, feature sets and technical options to choose from, so they must find the TMS that will best meet their unique requirements.

Increase ROI with a Tag Management System

Michael Garrity — Sun, 20 May 2012 16:00:00 GMT

In a Web world where a lot of data is created and shared every second of the day, being able to manage all of that information can be the difference between ‘Net success and failure.

As such, the majority of digital marketers surveyed in a recent Tealium and Econsultancy study said that tag management was the most important aspect of their accomplishments.

The survey, titled The ROI of Tag Management, polled over 300 executives, managers and specialists in the U.S., U.K. and Europe, and found that 87 percent of digital marketers feel that tag management is fundamental to their operations. Those who used a tag management system (TMS) said they saw impressive increases in efficiency, reduced costs and improved site performance.

And 73 percent of the participants said that their TMS improved their ability to run a marketing campaign, and 42 percent said the process was much faster as a result. In fact, 69 percent of TMS users could implement new or modify existing tags in a day, but 44 percent of manual tag managers said it could take over a week.

Speed was a factor too, as 64 percent of TMS users saw a boost in website speed, with slightly over half of them saying the increase was significantly faster. As far as costs go, 73 percent of participants using a TMS reported reduced resource costs.

Respondents also claimed that using a TMS allowed them to utilize almost twice as many online solutions, ranging from analytics to retargeting, for maximized results, especially when compared to professionals that manually manage site tags. Marketers using a TMS had an average of 19 tag-based online marketing solutions, while their system-less counterparts only averaged 10.

Due to growing complexity in the industry, 88 percent of those surveyed also said that they thought data-driven tools would be come standard for digital marketers, with 86 percent saying that they desire the control to make fast changes to their assets without burdening their IT department.

You can download the whole report here.

Self-service Tag Management with Tealium iQ

Linc Wonham — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:45:00 GMT

Tag Management solutions provider Tealium has announced the launch of Tealium iQ, a new self-service product that enables marketers to manage and deploy their digital marketing solutions without having to burden IT resources.

Tealium iQ’s new point-and-click user interface allows marketers to add, remove or modify the various Web page tags associated with the vast majority of today’s digital vendors. This means that digital marketers can launch online campaigns faster, measure more accurately and more easily swap out and test different marketing vendors before making a buying decision.

Web page tags are used for everything from data collection and measurement to behavioral targeting and online optimization. Tealium estimates that up to 90 percent of today’s digital marketing vendors – Web analytics companies, retargeting vendors, email service providers, affiliate marketers, etc. – use some type of JavaScript-based tag that needs to be implemented on a client’s website.

“The goal of tag management is to give marketing and measurement professionals direct control over their digital measurement infrastructure, and to eliminate the need for costly and time-consuming IT cycles,” says Gary Angel, president and CTO of the Web analytics and measurement consulting group Semphonic. “Tealium iQ does a superb job of that.”

With the proliferation in the number of website tags that must be managed today, Tealium iQ provides a single ‘universal’ tag that enables companies to manage and deploy all their different digital marketing solutions from one Web console. Most tag management solutions still require IT involvement and JavaScript knowledge, but Tealium iQ allows marketers to manage the tagging themselves through an intuitive new interface and instant integration with all major digital marketing vendors from Facebook to Google Analytics.

Users can click on a vendor, set some rules and hit publish to implement their tags automatically. They can do everything from adding a Google AdWords conversion code to their confirmation page to launching a banner retargeting campaign. Tealium customers include Cisco, Dreamworks, Advance Auto Parts, Orange, Classmates.com (now MemoryLane.com), Nicole Miller, FingerHut and Big Fish Games.