Tag management system

A tag management system is designed to help manage the lifecycle of e-marketing tags (sometimes referred to as tracking pixels or web beacons), which are used to integrate third-party software into digital properties.^[1]

Integration and challenges

Marketers rely on multiple third-party solutions to add functionality to web sites, video content, and mobile apps. Examples of such solutions include web analytics, campaign analytics, audience measurement, personalization, A/B testing, ad servers, retargeting, and conversion tracking.^[2]

Integration typically takes the form of adding a JavaScript code snippet to the content. At the most basic level, this poses maintenance, quality assurance, and performance challenges.

At the next level, because tags are the mechanism used to implement third-party solutions and to share data with them, by extension tag management is concerned with data management,^[3] data privacy, interoperability, governance and analytics^[4] issues.

Functionality

Tag management systems replace these multiple tags with a single container tag and subsequently prioritize and "fire" individual tags as appropriate based on business rules, navigation events and known data.^[5]

Typical functionality includes testing environment (sandboxing), audit trail/version control, ability to A/B test different solutions, tag deduplication, and role-based access to data.

Benefits

Typically cited benefits of tag management systems include:

• Agility: Reduced reliance on technical resources and reduced dependency on IT cycles confers greater agility to business users.^[6]
• Performance: Reduced page load times thanks to asynchronous tag loading, conditional tag loading and tag timeout functionality.
• Cost savings: Ability to deduplicate tags used to attribute commission.
• Data control: Ability to control data leakage to third-parties and comply with data privacy legislation (cookie consent, do not track).^[7] Tag managers also provide another layer of abstraction for managing the complexity of large websites.
• Safe preview: Some tag managers, such as Google Tag Manager, include a preview mode which allows checking for formatting and security issues before deploying tags to production.^[8]

Notable providers

• Ensighten^[9]
• Google^[10]
• Mezzobit^[11]
• TagCommander^[12]
• Tealium^[13]
• Signal^[14]
• Storm (company) Tag Manager^[15]
• Qubit. (company) Opentag^[16]
• Adobe^[17]
• IBM^[18]
• Conversant^[19]

References

1. "Gartner glossary entry". Gartner Inc. Retrieved 2015-02-13.
2. "Understanding Tag Management Tools And Technology". Forrester Research. Retrieved 2015-02-13.
3. "ChiefMartech". Scott Brinker. Retrieved 2015-02-13.
4. "Boost Digital Intelligence with Tag Management". Forrester Research. Retrieved 2015-02-09.
5. "Moz definition". SEOMoz Inc. Retrieved 2015-02-13.
6. "Understanding Tag Management Tools And Technology". Forrester Research. Retrieved 2015-02-13.
7. "TrustRadius tag management category definition". TrustRadius. Retrieved 2015-02-13.
8. Amari, Zaid. "Why you should setup Google Tag Manager". PPC Masterminds. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
9. "Ensighten Manage". Ensighten. Retrieved 2015-02-12.
10. "Google Tag Manager". Google. Retrieved 2015-02-12.
11. "Mezzobit". Mezzobit. Retrieved 2015-08-06.
12. "TagCommander Tag Management System". TagCommander. Retrieved 2015-02-12.
13. "Tealium iQ". Tealium. Retrieved 2015-02-12.
14. "Signal". Signal. Retrieved 2015-02-12.
15. "Storm Tag Manager - Independent, Enterprise Tag Management". DC Storm Limited. Retrieved 2015-06-18.
16. "Opentag: The most flexible enterprise tag manager". Qubit. Retrieved 2015-06-18.
17. "Dynamic tag management, tag manager | Adobe Marketing Cloud". www.adobe.com. Retrieved 2015-08-30.
18. "IBM Digital Data Exchange". Retrieved 2015-10-27.
19. "Conversant Tag Manager". Retrieved 2016-02-22.