What is Tag Management?

A user comes to your website from a search result link, browse some products, saves an item in her shopping basket, and checks-out after making the payment. Here, the basic details such as IP address, User Id, the date and time, and other browser related information are easily captured.

If you want to capture more data such as Traffic source and Demographics, you may install Google Analytics code on your website.

If you want more advanced analytics on your visitors, you may install Omniture (now part of adobe) code on your website.

If you want to compare your offerings vis-à-vis the competitors, you may install Compete code on your website.

So, as you go on enriching your data set with the purpose of deriving customer, competitor, and product insights, the website code keeps getting messier. This can have negative impact on performance and code manageability. Also, even small changes would need support from IT team delaying the process.

What is the solution to manage these ever increasing snippets of code (called as Tags)?

You have Tag management solutions from companies such as Tealium and Ensighten. Using them you can easily manage these Tags. Let’s see how do they work.

Source: ensighten website

These solutions implement an additional layer called the Data Layer between your website and the analytics providers (Google, Adobe, Compete etc.).  This Data Layer contains all your tags and executes them to capture a variety of visitor related data. The data collected is then passed on to the Analytics provider for processing. Additionally, the layer can further enrich the data to derive rich insights.

So you end up with all these providers talking to the Data Layer. This way, if you need a new analytics provider tomorrow, you can integrate it with the Data Layer without affecting the website. Also, the change can be done without any support from the technical team, speeding up the deployment.

Tag management system are becoming important as the consumer journey is becoming increasingly complex, spanning multiple devices across physical and online realms.