Earth Day: Cleaning Up Your Community & Tag Management System

Happy Earth Day!

Almost 50 years ago today, on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day was established after Earth Day founder and Wisconsin State Senator, Gaylord Nelson, witnessed an extensively destructive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. After launching a fierce political and media-heavy national campaign, he inspired more than 20 million Americans to be more publicly conscious around all issues on water, land and air pollution. Potentially silo’d groups of people fighting for different, yet relatable, causes came together to focus on cleaner streets, the loss of wilderness, toxic dumps and oil spills, extinction of precious wildlife and so much more.

Earth Day is still going strong today with more than 1 billion people celebrating it worldwide and giving their time and efforts back to mother earth in 192 countries – becoming the largest secular holiday in the world.

Here at Tealium we understand and appreciate the power of giving back to the greater good. This morning our Tealium Cares Crew headed out to one of the most populated and polluted beaches, here in our San Diego headquarter location, to help pickup trash and cleanup the beach. 

As you can see, the local outpouring of enthusiasm and love for the environment put a smile on everyone’s face.

Today’s Earth Day Celebration and spring officially being here reminded us that now is the perfect time to ‘Spring Clean’ our Tag Management Systems (TMS).

Having an organized, sophisticated and simple framework to host and manage your tags is imperative for optimal web performance and will help marketers achieve the most sought after goal of increasing conversions. Clean, active tags = improved performance = higher conversions.

Tealium’s Tag Experts recommend cleaning up and reviewing the following within your tag management system at least twice a year. Synching it with time changes might be a super helpful and easy way to remember this important cleanup process (Think – time change, replace smoke alarm batteries, turn the mattress and cleanup my tags): 

1. Run Tealium’s Tag Status Checker

Stay current on the latest and greatest set of features and bug fixes.

2. Review the source of the data

Confirm that all inclusive data is declared as part of the overall data layer so as not to read from disparate sources.

3. Remove duplicate load rules

Oftentimes a team member in one role is creating a load rule for something and another colleague within a different role is creating a load rule for the same thing, and both are being placed on the same page. Ensure there is only one load rule enabled per page or event by reviewing all load rules and removing any duplicates so you can see all tags scoped to an event, which will then make seeing the effect of updates easier.

4. Disable unmapped load rules

Review any active load rules that aren’t mapped to a tag and disable them. One less piece of code that the webpage has to process could mean faster webpage loading times, which means higher conversions for your campaigns.

5. Standardize naming conventions

Create, document and share with any team members who are in the TMS for consistency across the platform.

6. Delete any unused assets

Review load rules and tags to find ones that haven’t been used in awhile and delete. Most TMS’s will still allow these to be available in historical versions in case there is a need to reference back at any point. Keeping a lot of inactive tags within the system may make it harder for the system to go back in and find what’s needed from months or years prior.

7. Leverage labels

Keeping tags organized with labels is a great way to group and better report on configurations by channels (ie: a label for tags that are for ‘analytics’, a label for tags that are for ‘re-marketing’, and so forth.)

8. Setup workflows

Setting up different rights each user can have and creating streamlined workflows will allow for a safer check and balance for the work that’s being pushed into the production website.

9. Dive deeper into tags

The more a marketer knows about their tags the better they can optimize their TMS to run smoothly and efficiently. Tealium  recently launched a brand new learning community open to the public (score!) with hundreds of documentation gold for all things tag management – check it out here.

10. Give yourself a pat on the back

Cleaning up tags, systems and beaches may not be fun – but the effort is most definitely worth the reward of beautifying results. Great job on cleaning up!

Wondering how you can give back for Earth Day, and everyday thereafter? Checkout local volunteer initiatives in your area here.

Want to learn more on how Tealium has helped over 700 brands transform the digital experience their clients are expecting from them? Contact us today.