Tag Management and the 5 Gears of Marketing Velocity

This is a live blog post from the Online Marketing Summit (#OMSummit) – Presented by Erik Bratt , VP Marketing of Tealium

tag management 5 steps best practices

What are tags?

A “Tag” is a javascrip code that allows you to integrate third party serves into your digital platform.

The average enterprise web site has 14 different vendor tags!. Tags are a huge problem:

  • Costly, time-consuming to manage
  • Slows down website performance
  • Slows down marketing efficiency

Tag Proliferation – common types of tags:

  • Web analytics
  • Search marketing
  • Ad serviing
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Testing
  • Behavioral targeting
  • Etc

Tag Management allows the marketer to manage a tagging platform without having to go to IT. Check out Tealium Tag Management Platform.

The 5 Gears of Marketing Velocity

1. Increased Marketing Agility 

  • No waiting for IT dev cycles
  • Marketers control their own destiny
  • Launch more revenue – generating campaigns, faster
  • Enhance web presence through information

2. Reduce Costs

  • Save on valuable IT resources
  • JavaScript-trained web developers no longer required

3. Improved Site Performance 

  • Replace many tags with one
  • Employ tag best practices (conditional tag loading, slow tag killing, asynchronous tag loading)
  • As much as 50% increase in page load speed
  • One second delay in page load time = 7% loss in conversions (Aberdeen)

4. Lower Opportunity Costs

  • Tagging is non-strategic
  • IT is one of the most important in-house resources
  • IT has more important things to do than tagging

5. Work with the Best Vendors

  • Pick vendors based on ROI and fit
  • Don’t be locked into any one vendor
  • Use best of breed solutions for all your marketing needs (A/B test vendors)

Bonus One: Actionable Data Source! (The quest for clean actionable data) – DoubleClick, Omniture, Linkshare, ExactTarget, Fetchback, Etc.