Improving Performance with Conditional Tag Loading

A cornerstone of any enterprise tag management solution is the ability to conditionally load tags based on select criteria. Within the Tealium solution, this is referred to as “Load Rules”. Conditional load rules can be used to reduce the number of times tags are loaded and eliminate the redundant pixels. Examples include:

• Loading of tags based on source of traffic – for example, customers can set rules to load an AdWords tag on the confirmation page only if the traffic originated from an AdWords campaign.

• Loading tags only once – many tags need to be loaded only once during a session or per visitor. For example, if you’re launching a retargeting program for the shoes section of the site, you only need to launch the retargeting pixel once.

In order to demonstrate this capability, consider a web site deploying five different vendor tags on its confirmation page – as shown below. With traditional tagging, all 5 tags or pixels will load on the confirmation page regardless of the source of traffic.

Tag loading without conditional load rules

Conditional tag loading on the other hand lets you decide under which circumstance to load each tag on the confirmation page. As a best practice, you can create rules that let you load the AdWords tag on the confirmation page only if the source of traffic is AdWords, and do the same with other marketing tags. This alternative is shown below.

Tag loading with conditional load rule

Conditional loading of tags offer several advantages:

1. It improves page load time by dramatically reducing the number of pixels being called from the page (from 5 to 1 in our example).
2. It puts marketers in total control as to how and when they share critical data (i.e. transaction data) with third-party vendors. Rather than sharing all transaction data with all vendors, marketers can now share data on a “need-to-know” basis.

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