'Net Features : tag management systems

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.

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.

Would You Benefit from a Tag Management System?

Michael Garrity — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:15:00 GMT

Ask any online professional about analytics, and you may spend hours hearing about their vital importance in the pursuit of Web success.

One secret to garnering especially meaningful analytical insights is by breaking down data into different divisions to see more accurate reports of specific content categories. This process is achieved by using tags.

Tags are metadata keywords assigned to a piece of information or content on the Web that describe the item and make it more easily found when users go browsing and searching for it.

Tags are most common on blog-based or other content-heavy websites as a way to group, manage and track similar information. The problem, especially for less savvy content publishers, is that after a while, sites and pages will end up cluttered with unorganized tags, which sort of defeats the purpose. Because of this, analytics researchers are met with a mess of disorganized data thanks to duplicate, outdated or non-functioning tags that can give marketers and site owners inaccurate information, and that’s no help to anyone.

Enter tag management systems. These services come in and clean up the clutter created by disorganized, user-generated tags. Using a management system allows content publishers to collect all of their campaign’s tags into one container tag and then manage and maintain them in a single application.

According to TagMan, the benefits of such a system include greater accuracy in analytics results, more efficient tag management with a user-friendly interface, more control over all of a site’s tags, improved performance in page load times and serving tags to visitors, and greater flexibility in adding and testing new tags.

Unfortunately, it seems that many website owners tend to undervalue the worth of tag management; but for prolific content publishers (anyone from enterprise-level ecommerce companies to very busy bloggers), tag management systems are the easiest and perhaps most effective way to keep track of the performance of various content categories.

Many major companies have come to terms with the usefulness of tag management systems, however; currently, TagMan works with brands like Travelocity, Virgin Atlantic, Subaru and Kellogg’s, among many others.

Department store group Debenhams turned to TagMan while in the process of switching analytics providers. The site’s infrastructure was supplied and hosted by IBM, making any code changes a “delayed process.” To resolve this concern, Debenhams implemented the TagMan tag management system into its website so that it would be able to apply new online marketing technology without having to wait on code changes from the back-end infrastructure.

The single container tag used by services like TagMan replaces all on-site tags used to manage and track online marketing technologies; instead, these tags are stored in a tag management system that allows site owners to make immediate changes in a single, user-friendly, browser-based interface, never altering the code on the website. Ultimately, this allows content publishers to more effectively manage and track existing technologies and instantly install new ones. This improved efficiency saves site owners time, while giving them more accurate and insightful data from analysis and greater control over the way content is categorized on their websites.

In addition to TagMan, there are a number of tag management systems available, including UberTags, Tealium and Ensighten.