Joe Stanhope from Forrester Research: On Tag Management
Last week as we worked on Google AdWords and Analytics in class, we talked about 'auto-tagging' our results which brought up the subject of tags...what are tags? Tags, simply put, are code 'snippets' that allow third party tracking, analysis and reporting. Google Analytics and other web analytics programs such as Adobe Omniture. Auto-tagging in AdWords allows you to tell which ad was clicked to get to your destination URL, even if you have more than one ad pointing to the URL. As you can imagine, the whole process of attribution and analytics can be confusing.
Enter tag mangement to help with these issues. At the DAA (Digital Analytics Association) Symposium in Chicago last December, +Joe Stanhope of Forrester Research talked about tag management and tag management systems. Before efficient tag management systems, it might have taken the organization eight weeks to change a tag relating to a particular marketing campaign and the campaign could easily be over by that time.
Tag management systems are more efficient in that users can often control their own data. Because technologies make tag management faster and more efficient data can be analyzed more quickly and changes implemented (based on the resulting data) to optimize campaigns.
There can be 35 to 50 tags on an e-commerce marketing page and it can take a long time to wait for internal IT or an outside web developer to make these changes. Joe said 90% of companies don't want to wait for these systems.
Companies can also benefit from these systems by auditing their pages and getting ride of tags that are not being used. Joe mentioned that BrightTag is one tag management firm and Google has recently made their Google Tag Manager free and available to users. According to Joe, tag management has a bright future and can be beneficial to organizations. Enjoy this video in which Joe further describes the organizational benefits of tag management. Joe has been a long-time member of our advisory board and a good friend to our program. Keep up the good work keeping us informed.
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