Nuhdge > Consulting > Tag Management

Good tag management has become a critical element to successful digital and interactive marketing. If implemented poorly will impact the performance of your website, collect wrong or insufficient data from your website, and expose your company legally if you breach privacy and data collection laws.

What is a Tag?

Tags are used to collect and share data between your digital assets such as you website, and any 3rd party systems such as Google Analytics or Marketing automation systems. They are sometimes known as a Pixel (e.g., Facebook Pixel) or a beacon. They can be in the form of a transparent image, image tag, or JavaScript code which is incorporated into your website html code. When a visitor loads your page through their web browser or app, the tags are triggered.

Types of activities that are triggered can include

• Collect data through the browser such as user ID, behavior and user context
• Set cookies on the client device
• Enable audience extension
• Include third-party content

Examples of Tags

There are hundreds of vendors who require you to implement their tags on your website. These are some of the most commonly used.

• Data Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, WordPress Stats
• Heatmapping services such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg
• Marketing automation such as Hubspot, Marketo, Kissmetrics
• Advertising solutions such as DoubleClick, google and Facebook Remarketing
• Split testing such as Optimizely and VWO
• Social media Facebook Connect, Twitter, AddThis
• Widgets such as Disqus, Gravatar

Challenges with Tag Management

As you can see from the above examples, any company who even does a moderate amount of digital marketing can quickly accumulate dozens of tags on their website. This creates a number of challenges with implementation and manage of Tags on your website that you need to consider.

• The more vendors you use, the more tags are required to be loaded on to your website.
• Tags can impact the speed and performance of your website, by adding load times to the website and putting increased demands on browser and computer resources
• You can lose or fail to capture data if tags are incorrectly implemented and fail to trigger or work.
• You need to correctly design and monitor tags behaviour
• tags can put visitor privacy at risk given that not all vendors operate in the same legal jurisdiction as your company, and frankly not all tags are ethical.
• Some tags facilitate piggy backing (tags within tags) which means you are not always in control of what interactions occur between your website and your customers
• Overall, the process of implementing, managing and monitoring tags can become a complex task, which is beyond the capability (or even interest)

If you need assistance setting up your tag management and analytics tracking systems.