Tag Management System

What is a Tag Management System (TMS)?

Have you ever used a small snippet of code to track visitors on your website, display ads, or track conversions? If so, you’ve used tags before. On most of today’s websites, tags are used to collect essential analytics data for marketing purposes and in turn, make important business decisions. Adding tags, however, can often be tricky and one little mistake can cause long page load times, a negative customer experience, and a drop in overall revenue.

A more simple way of managing tags is to consolidate them into a tag management system (TMS). This is an editable solution that doesn’t require fiddling around with coding files.

Use Cases:

Time Management

Strategic planning is crucial to successful tag management and governance. Tag management systems help organizations become leaner, but you’ll still need to devote time and energy into managing and governing third party tags.

Prioritization

Tag management systems help development teams drive business value on a daily basis and create measurable bottom line results by providing data-driven insights to drive business objectives.

Website Performance

As more tags are added to a website, the site becomes more and more complex and enlarged, becoming ever more difficult to manage. This can result in slow page speed, creating a poor user experience with less conversions and revenue.

How Tag Management Can Help You

Two questions to ask yourself when considering if you need a tag management system are:

  1. Do I change tags often?
  2. Can tag changes be made quickly?

The larger the website, the slower the changes will be implemented, which can become a time-consuming and tedious process. A well-managed TMS, however, allows you to:

  • Make rapid changes to tags
  • Enforce new tags quickly
  • Set tag dimensions
  • Overall, have more control over your website

Best Practices

Google (Google PageSpeed Insights Rules) and Yahoo (Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website) have excellent resources on tag management and have the best practices that can be used as guideposts for managing a TMS system:

Google’s Recommendations
  • Enable Compression
  • Leverage Browser Caching
  • Minify Resources
  • Remove Render-blocking JavaScript
  • Use Asynchronous Scripts
Yahoo’s Recommendations
  • Minimize HTTP Requests
  • Use a Content Delivery Network:
  • Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
  • Gzip Components
  • Put Scripts at the Bottom
  • Make JavaScript and CSS External
  • Reduce DNS Lookups
  • Minify JavaScript and CSS
  • Remove Duplicate Scripts
  • Split Components Across Domains
  • Minimize the Number of iframes
  • Reduce Cookie Size
  • Use Cookie-free Domains for Components

The above concepts highlighted by Google and Yahoo are typically the best practices for website development. Consulta Labs’s Tag Management consultancy practice ensures the foundational elements in implementing and managing a TMS are done right for continued improvement in your website performance.

How to Best Manage Tags for Revenue

Monitoring the performance of each tag based on real user experiences can be a challenging process. To truly establish long-term success, an organization must ask itself the following questions:

  • Who is ultimately accountable for that tag/technology?
  • Who should own insights that drive business decisions for that tag/technology?
  • How should those insights from this tag/technology be delivered in a timely manner?
  • Who should receive those insights?
  • What are the expected actions team members must take utilizing those insights?
  • Who should own prioritization of the workflows that fit into the larger vision of the organization?

Now, repeat that process for every single tag on your website.

Answering these questions should help the organization steer its TMS strategy roadmap and create true governance over the process. Here at Consulta Labs, our Tag Management experts take the stress and complications out of managing tags by working hand-in-hand with our clients to improve the speed of their websites, increase conversations, and in result, increase their revenue. Consult our Director, Nikhil Sojitra, at connect@consultalabs.com for the best solution for your site.

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