Let’s face it, technology isn’t perfect. After all, behind the million lines of code, server racks and bright monitors, are people – issues can and will arise. Luckily, having a tag management solution (TMS) in place can mean the difference between a catastrophic website outage and business continuity. Today, digital marketing solutions are critical to the success of most businesses in acquiring, converting and retaining customers. Furthermore, without properly functioning marketing tags (also known as tracking pixels / beacons or JavaScript snippets), your marketing solutions wouldn’t even be able to operate. Making sure that these solutions don’t impact the online customer experience, or worse, revenue generation, is more important than ever.
There are a variety of reasons that can cause tags to malfunction, or ‘go rogue’ as I like to call it. Let’s explore a few common scenarios:
This has happened to everyone at one point in time. A few years ago I worked at an organization in which an employee mistakenly turned off the power switch to the entire rack, effectively taking down 2,000+ websites in a matter of seconds. Servers do go down and can take a lot of time to get back up and running. If your vendor’s server crashes you could be stuck with pages that hang in limbo waiting for a response, leading to very slow load times or even browser timeouts. In either case your customers will go somewhere else, quickly.
Remember those people behind the scenes? Yep, they’re at it again – this time writing bad code. Many of today’s vendor tags reference code libraries that are installed when the page loads. This code can easily contain bugs, causing errors, warning messages, broken page functionality or inaccessible pages. Customers could be faced with SSL cautions or even the dreaded, security warning. No customer trust = lost sales.
Have you ever had a vendor make an upgrade to their tag and forget to tell you? Or what about an “enhancement” that suddenly changes functionality? When was the last time the report you rely on everyday just stopped gathering data after one of these product updates? What’s the point of the solution if it doesn’t work because it can’t get data?
Unfortunately many marketers and data-driven professionals are still manually managing tags today. Often, the problems caused by rogue tags either get overlooked, or require IT to get involved, resulting in a delayed response. Tag management can be employed to not only deal with these issues when they arise, but also serve as a protective barrier.
Many tag management solutions will enable you to take it one step further with tag performance reporting. Are you finding that something is continually slowing things down? Find out what it is. Enterprise solutions monitor and track the performance of the tags loading to your pages. The best solutions on the market will automatically alert you of tag ‘kill’ instances or abnormal data issues, such as orders completing with no order IDs or order totals. Read our case study from Deckers, the parent company of UGG®, which shows how the company use Tealium to handle a faulty tag that was causing serious page delays on Cyber Monday, one of the most important online shopping days of the year.