Every organisation knows that it's important not only to have an engaging website or digital marketing campaign, but to also track what is happening and how users engage on the website or campaign. This is typically done by applying tags to the underlying code. If you find these measurement tags are becoming difficult to manage and interpret the results, it’s probably time for a tag management system. Tag Management Systems allow you to manage 3rd party tags within a single UI, enhancing workflow and leading to many distinct benefits. This article will discuss the five key selling points of a TMS:
Features
The main benefit of a TMS is having an uncomplicated system to manage a number of business requirements like clever tags, containers or filters. If your business goals are to manage tag loads in basic manners, you may not need a top of the line system. Look out for security policies and ensure that tags load asynchronously to ensure smooth and quick loads of the page. Furthermore, TMS gets rid of the bottleneck that can sit with IT/Web Developers. It allows businesses to deploy code quickly and easily. This reduces the associated time and cost by eliminating the need to manually hard-code things onto the site.
Reliability
TMS basically introduces a new solution if cloud-based infrastructure is the option. Enquire about the cloud service being used, its availability, up-time and its performance track record. Going for a TMS usually means you are serious about data quality, efficiency and see it as an asset to the business. That being the case do you really want to select a TMS by the “cheapest” cloud-service option available or even worse, a providers own unknown in-house infrastructure?
Attribution
Affiliate networks offer “pay predetermined increment of conversion” where a percentage of conversion revenue is paid to the affiliates and functions on a “last click” model. The problem comes in when multiple affiliates claim the same conversion (multiple affiliates are attributed). How accurate is the TMS in identifying which channel and affiliate delivered the ‘last click’ to save affiliate commissions through effective de-duplication? Custom Attribution (on the fly) is key in this point, where the needs are for live analyses when no other attribution systems exist.
Performance
From a technical perspective, there’s a significant impact whether the tags load synchronously/in order (as the page loads) vs fully asynchronously (best) all at once. This is easily exemplified in the Google Analytics (GA) switch from old/synchronous tags to the new sync ones – the newer method is providing increased performance and much better data quality. Asynchronous tag loading will ensure all tags are fired at once vs in order as the page loads, slowing down the load time and potentially allowing for users to move on/close the browser before all tags load. What this means is that your site load time could be dramatically improved – by as much as 40%.
Pricing
Most TMS operate on a scale less basis (SME vs Enterprise), with most charging an initial fixed fee followed by an incremental fee based on a mixture of dimensions and metrics i.e. number of sites, traffic volume, page loads etc. or a monthly flat fee via retainer. New tag management systems are being developed that are free of charge such as Google Tag Manager VS Paid (TagMan, Telium, Quibit). Marketers should look into potential cost-saving and revenue increase, based on the features listed above. Tag management plays an increasingly essential role for agile marketers but it’s still something that a lot of people are struggling to get to grips with. Have you recently set up TMS on your site?
Conclusion
TMS plays an increasingly essential role in eliminating the IT/web development bottleneck that can often thwart efficient adoption of new business technologies. So, if your business is looking to improve page load times, reduce costs and take swift action then a TMS may be exactly what your site needs.