We have all heard of Tag Management Systems (TMS) and why we should have one. For the past years, we have not been doing new implementations of Analytics solutions, without a Tag Management System having been involved.
But many companies limit their usage of a TMS to merely deploying analytics and marketing tags and ensure data capture. But what if your TMS could do more for you, for example support your efforts in driving testing and personalisation?
For the past years, eCapacity has been looking into the TMS market and developed various solutions on top of Ensighten, Tealium, Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager and Google Tag Manager.
9 in 10 cases of client work on TMS’ revolve around the deployment og tags. The remaining 10% concern more advanced usage of TMS to facilitate personalization and improving user experience……
Before we go into some of the more advanced solutions, let’s look into the basic of a Tag Management system and some of the common pitfalls you should avoid as a digital marketer or tool-stack owner.
The fundamentals
A tag manager is simply a tool, that allows you to deploy tags (code) to your website, without first requesting developer resources via from IT.
As a marketer you do not have to create IT-tickets, going through various prioritisation and budget discussions and so on, to deploy a basic AdWords marketing tags or what have we.
Some TMS’s have integrations with various vendors, making the deployments of tags extremely easy and allowing marketers to deploy tags by themselves without having any developer skills. Other TMS’s requires some technical skill to deploy tags.
Deploying code without going via IT may sounds as the perfect world for a marketer. And a nightmare for IT. Therefore, before you deploy a TMS solution it is critical to setup a process and governance model with your IT department, to ensure compliance and to ensure that you do not break your site.
eCapacity recommend, creating a process for deploying tags and changes via TMS in corporation with your IT and QA department, to ensure your usage of TMS do not break anything on your site. We have seen various examples where processes have not been made (or followed), resulting in a bad user experience, lost sales and at the end some tough dialogues with IT.
Tag Management can support your testing and personalisation program!
As stated in the introduction, your TMS can do much more than just serving Analytics and Marketing tags for you.
One of the most common tasks beside implementing basic tags and solutions that we are using our clients TMS to, are triggering Surveys based on onsite user-behaviour. Since Adobe closed down their Survey solution, there has not been many great survey solutions, that could trigger onsite based on behavioural data. This both includes popup surveys, or by adding a ‘feedback button’ to the website, as soon the user meets the requirements.
Another task we have been using a TMS to solve, was when testing out a new product page design for a client. Via their targeting platform (Adobe Target) we build the design. However, we needed some extra functionality to another page that users would see after they had seen the re-designed product page. We used the TMS to provide this functionality, and therefore managed to execute the fairly advanced test, using the best of Adobe Target and Tealium (the chosen Tag Management system).
In general, you should see your Tag Management System, as a tool that can support you not only add/change marketing, analytics and personalisation tags but also add or change functionality on your site, in conjunction with any of the tools you deploy on your website.
If you do not already use a Tag Management System or want to know how you and your company can take advantage of it, please contact us at eCapacity.
Customer references and case studies
