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What Is Enterprise Tag Management? Why Should You Implement Tag Management?

Verbiage that people use in the industry can get confusing. If you’re talking about tagging with blogging, you probably mean selecting terms that are important to the article to tag it and make it easy to search for and find. Tag management is a totally different technology and solution. In my opinion, I think it’s poorly named… but it’s become the common term throughout the industry so we’ll explain it!

What is Tag Management?

Tagging a site is adding some script tags to the head, body, or footer of a site. If you’re running multiple analytics platforms, testing services, conversion tracking, or even some dynamic or targeted content systems, it almost always requires you to input scripts into your content management system’s core templates. Tag management systems (TMS) provide you with one script to insert into your template and then you can manage all others through the third-party platform. The tag management system allows you to build containers where you can intelligently organize the tags that you wish to manage.

In an enterprise organization, tag management enables the marketing team, web design team, content teams, and IT teams to work independently of one another. As a result, the digital marketing team can deploy and manage tags without impacting the content or design teams… or having to make requests to the IT teams. Additionally, enterprise tag management platforms offer the auditing, access, and permissions needed to speed deployment and reduce the risks of breaking the site or application.

Be sure to read our post on deploying ecommerce tag management, with a list of 100 critical tags to deploy and measure your customer interaction and purchase behavior.

Why Should Your Business Use A Tag Management System?

There are several reasons why you might want to incorporate a tag management system into your operations.

  • In an enterprise environment where protocol, compliance, and security prevent marketers from inserting scripts easily into their CMS. Requests to add, edit, update or remove site script tags may delay your ability to manage your marketing efforts. A tag management system corrects this because you only need to insert a single tag from your tag management system and then manage all the rest from that system. You never have to make another request to your infrastructure team!
  • Tag management systems are powered across content delivery networks that are incredibly fast. By making a single request to their service and then subsequently loading scripts within your site, you can reduce load times and eliminate the possibility that your site will freeze up if the service isn’t running downstream. This will increase conversion rates and help your search engine optimization.
  • Tag management systems offer the opportunity to avoid duplicate tagging, resulting in more accurate measurements of all of your properties.
  • Tag management systems often offer point-and-click integrations with all of the solutions you’re tagging your website with. No need for tons of copying and pasting, just log in and enable each solution!
  • Many tag management systems have evolved and offer robust solutions for split testing, A/B testing, and multivariate testing. Want to test a new headline or image on your site to see if it increases engagement or click-through rates? Go right ahead!
  • Some tag management systems even offer dynamic or targeted content delivery. For instance, you may want to change your site’s experience if the visitor is a customer versus a prospect.

10 Benefits of Tag Management

Here’s a great overview infographic of the top 10 benefits of tag management for digital marketers from Nabler.

  1. Build your own marketing cloud (BYOMC): This process includes creating a data layer that acts as a common dictionary for digital marketing applications. This unifying roadmap can synchronize data among different software packages, even if they don’t directly connect with each other.
  2. Explore new insights: Advanced tag management systems or marketing cloud solutions allow marketers to generate new, correlated insights. This helps connect the dots between visitors and their multi-device profiles, inching closer to becoming truly omnichannel.
  3. Boost the speed of running marketing campaigns: Over 80% of marketers feel that their speed of running digital marketing campaigns has increased with the use of tag management solutions. Marketers can launch advanced campaigns effectively, optimize results faster, test options quickly, and change code instantly when needed.
  4. Optimize and enhance: Over 33% of digital marketers believe that tag management improves campaign ROI, increases revenues, and improves optimization during campaigns. Tag management systems remove unnecessary or broken tags, replacing them with well-managed tags that can be edited with ease whenever needed.
  5. Segmentation and personalization: Effective tag management allows the integration and correlation of data from varied marketing applications, which were previously working independently. This data is useful for developing deeper customer profiles and better segmentation and personalization.
  6. Increase website privacy: Tag management solutions simplify the process of ensuring privacy compliance, helping to adhere to the various digital privacy laws in different countries.
  7. More experimentation: Tag management solutions allow digital marketers to conduct and tag A/B or multivariate tests on their digital properties, thereby measuring results accurately. The use of these solutions has increased experimentation by 17%.
  8. Tag management for mobile: Although not as prevalent, the use of tag management for mobile websites is growing. As of January 2015, 55% of digital marketers in North America reported a somewhat positive effect, with 21% experiencing a very positive effect from mobile tagging.
  9. Select better vendors: Tag management solutions enable the creation of split segmentation for different service providers quickly, capturing comparative results in real-time. This feature provides a quantitative performance comparison of various tools and applications, helping marketers make data-driven decisions.
  10. Reduce digital marketing costs: Tag management solutions can help measure the performance of marketing assets and manage tags independently, freeing up IT resources. A recent study revealed that 73% of respondents found using a Tag Management System (TMS) more cost-effective, and 45% reported that it’s significantly less expensive than manual tagging.

The infographic concludes by noting that despite the evident benefits of tag management solutions, adoption rates have been relatively low. However, the rate is gradually increasing as companies realize the benefits of using a tag management tool as a transparent marketing middleware. This tool becomes a common communication platform for marketers, IT teams, and solution vendors, making the whole process faster, more visible, and more lucrative for all stakeholders involved.

tag management infographic

Enterprise Tag Management Systems (TMS) Platforms

Following is a list of enterprise tag management solutions, be sure to watch the videos on some of these for further explanation of the capabilities of tag management and tag management systems.

  • Adobe Experience Cloud – Trying to manage client-side deployments of all the technologies in your marketing stack can be fraught with challenges. Fortunately, Experience Platform Launch was built with an API-first design, which allows for scripting to automate technology deployments, publishing workflows, data collection and sharing, and more. So the time-consuming tasks of the past, like web tag management or mobile SDK configuration, take less time — giving you maximum control and automation.
  • Ensighten Enterprise Tag Management – Manage all your vendor tags and data through one intuitive interface, featuring more than 1,100 turnkey vendor integrations. Unify and standardize fragmented data sources across technologies and devices to drive greater ROI from your evolving technology stack through one data layer tag manager.
  • Google Tag Manager – Google Tag Manager lets you add or update your website tags and mobile applications, easily and for free, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks.
  • Tealium iQ – Tealium iQ enables organizations to control and manage their customer data and MarTech vendors across web, mobile, IoT, and connected devices. Equipped with an ecosystem of over 1,300 turnkey vendor integrations offered via tags and APIs, you can easily deploy and manage vendor tags, test new technologies, and finally take control of your marketing technology stack.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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