The Growing Case for Tag Management Systems

One of the  conversations that digital marketing teams engage in today’s environment is whether  they need a tag management system or not. As companies are increasing their use of digital marketing technologies, their need for a tag management solution increases. Up to now, most companies seeking a tag management system typically shared one of two characteristics:

• They deployed lots of different tags (i.e. analytics, ads, affiliates, etc.)
• They had a constant need to change tags (i.e. new marketing programs, trial of new vendors, etc.)

There are of course other factors that can prompt organizations to invest in tag management systems. For a thorough list, we recommend that you check out the Forrester research titled “How Tag Management Improves Web Intelligence” by Joe Stanhope.

Up to now the group least likely to require a tag management system included the two following characteristics:

• They don’t use lots of tags
• The have no plans to change their vendors

Sounds logical right? Think again.

Just recently, Google introduced a new feature in Google Analytics which provides valuable reports around page load performance, called Site Speed Reports. The new feature helps companies determine  the impact of site performance on their web site conversion.

In order to take advantage of this features, customers will have to update their tracking code in the following manner:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-XXXXX-X’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageLoadTime’]);
(function() { var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true; ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script>

The change of tracking code is not unique to Google Analytics. Just recently, Yahoo! announced that the Yahoo! Web Analytics tracking code V4 will no longer be supported.

In both cases, tag management systems let customers update their tracking code without changing their pages. For Tealium customers, this is just a matter of changing their templates from within the Tag Management Console.

We’re no longer seeing tag management as a technology deployed by customers that want to constantly add or change their vendors, but also by organizations that want to make sure that they’re deploying the latest version of their vendor tags. To find out more about how Tealium can help you leverage the latest features from your digital marketing vendors, contact us.