Christy Uher Ferguson Every time a shopper logs onto your website, digital marketing opportunities abound. Thanks to today’s automated marketing solutions, you can not only track your customers’ preferences, but you can also analyze how they navigate your pages, offer them a coupon, target their zip code . . . among umpteen other options.
It may seem like “magic,” but all this digital wizardry is performed by website vendor tags—actually small snippets of JavaScript code—which programmers deploy to gather a staggering amount of mostly useful data. However, if you find these codes are becoming difficult to administer, it’s probably time for a Tag Management System (TMS). 
Here are some of the most common problems we’re starting to see with website vendor tags:
- They’re manually coded, which means the process eats up expensive IT time.
- They don’t always work. Your vendor may think the tags are helping you gather info, but the codes simply may not compute.
- All that coding slows down your website.
Order to the Rescue
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Tag management systems were developed to solve these problems . . . and they do, elegantly. Instead of a hodge-podge of long-winded, individual codes, TMS employs a single line of code on each website page. Provided by a host of relatively new vendors, this single line of JavaScript coding enables digital marketers to manage tags themselves without advanced IT expertise. Then, once a set of criteria is established, the right data is passed to each system controlled by the tag manager.
The Future of Online Marketing
New research by Tealium and Econsultancy shows just how important tag management is to the future of online marketing. Called the “The ROI of Tag Management,” this study of 300 executives, managers and specialists in the US, UK and Europe reports that those using a tag management system experienced massive gains in digital marketing efficiency, reduced costs and improved web site performance. Just look at these findings:
- 87 percent of participants now consider the effective management of web site vendor tags as fundamental to digital marketing.
- 73 percent of respondents said that using a tag management system improved their ability to run marketing campaigns, with 42 percent describing the process as “significantly faster.”
- 69 percent of those using a TMS were able to implement new tags or modify existing ones within the same workday, while 44 percent of those not using a TMS said it took longer than a week.
- 64 percent said a TMS boosted web site speed, with slightly more than half of those reporting that increase as “significantly faster.”
- Using a TMS also had a dramatic impact on cost savings, with 73 percent saying it reduced resource costs compared to those not using a TMS.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen online marketing revenues explode—from less than $1 billion in 1999 to almost $8 billion in 2011 –and, of course, this trend shows no signs of stopping. That means data-driven tools like TMS are becoming more and more vital –and fundamental, even –to the marketer’s toolkit. Make no mistake about it: As Ecoconsultancy concludes, digital marketers want to be in control of their solutions, and 86 percent of those polled in this survey said that making fast changes to marketing assets without burdening the IT team will be increasingly important.
This article originally appeared on Aprimo Blog and has been republished with permission.
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Hi Christy!
Great article about tag management! I’m pretty excited about all the analytical tools assisting digital marketers and the time they save all of us. Have you heard about Google Tag Manager? It just came out and it should shake up the market big time. A problem we noticed is the time spent initially searching for those tags in your website’s code, especially if you’re a marketer and not a programmer. So InfoTrust created a free tool that finds tags in your website’s code and generates a report of all tag locations for you. Check out http://www.taginspector.com, which automatically pulls tag locations for you and sends you a report. It’s still in beta but let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on how to improve the tool. Love hearing an expert’s opinion!
Amin