15-minute guide to enterprise tag management - ensighten · enterprise tag management delivers an...
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JULY 2016
15-MINUTE GUIDE
Enterprise Tag Management
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“Since JavaScript became the de facto standard for collecting digital data, the quantity of tags that firms have had to manage has exponentially exploded as the number of analytic techniques and digital touch points have grown. Ad hoc processes for managing these tags are not scalable or sustainable…”
Boost Digital Intelligence With Tag Management James McCormick, Forrester Research
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Tag management is important for so many reasons It accelerates marketing, speeds website performance and creates a powerful foundation for unifying siloed marketing technologies and disparate customer data sources —just to name a few.
Ultimately, tag management is the lynchpin for optimizing customer
experiences across all touch points, including web, mobile, kiosks and other
channels, helping to unite and leverage first-party data in ways that few
other applications can. As a newer application, tag management has also
had its challenges: it’s classic “marketing middleware,” meaning that it sits
below many of the sexier marketing execution systems that interface with
customers directly.
Tag management is also a bit of a misnomer—it’s really about data, not
tags—making it harder to grasp. Nevertheless, once marketers and their IT
counterparts understand what enterprise tag management can really do,
a light bulb goes off, and it instantly becomes a must-have solution.
Editor’s Note: We get it—you’re busy. But you still want
great information. That’s why we created this
15-minute guide. Our goal: give you everything
you need to know about tag management (or
at least the core concepts) in a crisp 15 minutes,
depending on your reading speed, of course.
We hope you enjoy this guide. Hurry, the clock
is ticking!
15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management
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These tags usually do one of two things: collect visitor behavior
information or serve some type of product functionality. Tags
are used by a wide cross-section of vendors, including analytics,
advertising, affiliate marketing, marketing automation, live
chat and much, much more. So what’s the problem with tags?
During the last decade, tags became the de facto method for
data collection among nearly all digital marketing vendors. As
the number of marketing technologies has exploded, so has the
number of tags, creating a bottleneck between marketing and
IT departments to get the tags deployed, and perpetuating the
siloed nature of marketing, given the fact that each vendor tag
leverages its own proprietary data definitions. In a word, chaos—
but also an opportunity for those who can learn to navigate the
modern digital landscape.
According to ChiefMartec.com, the number of marketing technology vendors grew to 1,876 in 2015, more than double from the previous year, and a 10-fold increase since 2011.
What is a tag? Let’s get this out of the way first. “Tags” are simply snippets of JavaScript code that many third-party digital marketing vendors require their customers to add to their digital properties.
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Enterprise tag management systems began to emerge in 2009
in response to the growth in tag-based solutions and increasingly
long deployment cycles. For every new and updated solution
marketers wanted to deploy, the greater the reliance on already
overburdened IT staff to manually code these tags into the
website. These deployments could weeks, months or even years
depending on code freezes and other factors.
Enter tag management, which enables both marketing and
technical users to add, edit or remove any tag within minutes
through a convenient web interface. Once the tag management
system is implemented, marketers simply click on a vendor logo,
add some account details, specify when to load the tag and
where, and hit publish. The tag is automatically deployed onto
the web page without any coding. Tag management systems
have out-of-the-box integrations within the digital marketing
ecosystem, with some enterprise solutions boasting as many as
1,000+ turnkey integrations.
Tag management accomplishes another nifty trick—because
the tag serves as the convergence point for visitor data, tag
management, housing all the tags, has access to all the data, and
can easily correlate visitor IDs to help create a unified customer
view, something we’ll discuss more later on.
How does enterprise tag management work?
15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management
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One of the most important aspects of tag management systems is
the creation of the data layer, which refers to a layer of available data
on your website(s) that can be leveraged for analytics and marketing
action. This data can be found in numerous places and sources—in
the meta tags of your pages, customer browser details, cookies,
URL tracking parameters, JavaScript objects and more. A data layer
creates a common data dictionary, ensuring that each application
is leveraging the same definitions. This makes it easier to harmonize
technologies, correlate data and, ultimately, drive action.
Geeking out: A few words about the data layer
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Accelerate Marketing Deployments
Marketers can launch key solutions and campaigns faster and
easier than ever before. This accelerates time-to-revenue
dramatically.
Enhance Site Performance
Tag management removes bloated code and creates intelligent
rules for tag loading. It also provides a high-speed architecture for
tag delivery. This serves to increase page-load speed, which can
directly impact conversions and revenue.
Leverage best of breed solutions
Tag management helps marketers avoid “vendor lock-in” by
making it easy to add or remove any solution. This ultimately
gives them flexibility to use the solutions that are right for
their business. Instead of investing in a proprietary marketing
cloud, organizations can assemble their own custom marketing
technology stack.
Ensure privacy compliance and data governance
Today’s technology stack is a swirling vortex of unmanaged
customer data. Enterprise tag management makes it possible to
control data leakage from the browser, and ensure full compliance
with consumer and global privacy preferences.
Drive next-generation customer interactions
Marketers can turn to enterprise tag management to establish a
foundation for creating and optimizing rich, first-party customer
profiles, which can be shared across marketing execution systems
to drive real-time action.
Five core benefits of tag management Enterprise tag management delivers an inordinate number of business benefits for just one solution, from accelerated tag deployments to data governance. With that said, here are five highlights:
“The speed. I can't get over the speed. What would have taken developers weeks or months, took days."
Tim Curtis, Jack Stack Barbecue, referring to tag deployments
15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management
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The same nifty benefits that apply to traditional web sites and mobile
websites also apply to mobile apps. Once the tag management system is
baked into the mobile app, marketers and developers can deploy solutions
or adjust key data points without having
to rebuild the app and re-certify it through
the platform provider (iOS, Android). True
enterprise tag management systems deliver
a powerful combination of out-of-the-box
lifecycle metrics, mobile tag management, and real-time optimization and
testing. This makes it easy to jump-start any mobile marketing initiative,
as well as better engage visitors in a mobile environment.
More than half of digital business professionals (57 percent) say they do not use analytics within their mobile apps, according to Forrester Research (2014).
What about mobile?
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Free Offerings Tag management tools
offered at no cost have
value for small businesses
managing a handful of vendor tags
on comparatively simple digital
infrastructures. This approach to tag
delivery (so-called “client-side” tag
management) has limited scalability
and data security, making these
tools unsuitable for mid- and large-
sized businesses. They also offer no
direct data ownership, service-level
agreements or dedicated customer
support. Tag managers that are bundled
into marketing vendor products are not
truly free, and also lack many of the key
capabilities mentioned here.
Basic Packages
Offerings from companies
that cater primarily to
the mid-market deliver
more advanced capabilities than the
free tools, but they rely on the same
client-side methodology and limit much
of their focus to templated interfaces
and simpler, web-specific use cases,
instead of providing true omni-channel
support. These packages have significant
limitations particularly when it comes
to scalability, customization, mature
workflow, data privacy and support for
use cases spanning mobile apps and
offsite data collection.
Enterprise Tag Management
True enterprise tag
management systems add
the full range of capabilities that mature
marketers need for today’s management
of an ever-growing set of digital
technologies. For a tag management
system to be truly enterprise, it must
support any tag, at any scale, in any
channel. It must be able to handle the
explosion of marketing data available to
today’s marketer in a way that promotes
data ownership and keeps data as secure
and private as possible.
Three tiers of tag management While tag management has emerged as fundamental to enterprise digital marketing, a wide variation in capabilities has produced a three-tiered market:
15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management
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Intuit saw an immediate 30 percent increase in business
performance by using enterprise tag management to
streamline technology deployments, boost site performance
and drive better user experiences.
US Bank reduced tag implementation time by 95 percent,
and improved site targeting by 25 percent through better
management of data and technology.
TUI eliminated marketing silos and is driving more consis-
tent and relevant customer interactions across brand touch
points—desktop, mobile web and mobile app—through a
unified customer view.
TD Bank reduced page load time by 50 percent and improved
marketing attribution by using enterprise tag management
to speed deployments and enhance multi-channel attribution.
The ROI of enterprise tag management An enterprise tag management system can increase revenue, reduce costs and create new opportunities for growth.
United realized an eight-digit ROI within 10 months
by unifying fragmented data sources to gain a
unified view of the customer.
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Then enterprise tag management may be for you. Here are seven
sure-fire reasons you might need tag management:
Are you ready for enterprise tag management? Does your IT staff run and hide when you approach them about deploying a new tag? Is your site getting slower and slower thanks to tag proliferation? Are you still engaged in siloed marketing?
It’s going on three months and that retargeting advertising
solution you contracted for is still not deployed across your
network of sites—delaying time to revenue.
Your IT department gives you an estimate of five to six
months to deploy your new enterprise analytics solution.
You lack any usage metrics for your native mobile app,
making it difficult to optimize the app to drive better
engagement.
Your website performance is beginning to slow, thanks in
part to the proliferation of tags.
You have no easy way to control whether your tags are
exposing customer data, violating consumer privacy
preferences or operating outside your privacy policy.
You have no way of giving granular tag control to different
groups, both internally and externally.
You have no easy way to create a single customer view for
driving action, including unifying onsite, off-site and offline
data sources.
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15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management
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“Historically, viewing a single customer journey was impossible. (Tag management) allows us to
have a single identifier across all brands.”
Adrian Maguire, TUI Group, as told to Exchange Wire
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The best enterprise tag management systems will continuously
evolve to support the new omni-channel customer journeys. The
focus will be on helping the marketing and IT teams integrate
technology and data to deliver seamless experiences across any
touch points, leveraging rich, first-party customer data and profiles.
Enterprise tag management delivers those capabilities to any
organization. Additionally tag management’s role in securing
data and ensuring consumer privacy as rules become stricter
across international borders will become increasingly vital to the
enterprise. In short, enterprise tag management is now more
important than ever. It has entrenched itself as a foundational
piece of the modern marketing technology stack.
The evolution of enterprise tag management Enterprise marketing teams today engage large and diverse customer groups in complex digital environments. That ecosystem will only become more complex with the pace of future technology innovation.
Onsite Off-site
OfflineData Providers
15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management
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Tags
Image pixels or snippets of JavaScript code that nearly all
digital marketing vendors use to either: (1) measure visitor
behavior, or (2) serve product functionality. Tags help drive many
third-party applications, from web analytics to advertising and
social media sharing.
First-party data
Visitor interactions collected directly on the website, mobile
app or other company-owned channel. This is the richest, most
extensible and actionable source of data.
Global whitelisting
Prevents tags from firing, except for those on the whitelist. This
is one of the key ways that enterprise tag management can be
leveraged to secure data and protect consumer privacy with rules
governing access to tags and data.
Piggybacking
Tags chained together by appending them to existing tags
already in place on the website without making any changes
to the page code. Piggybacking can add dozens of tags and
introduce services that the site owner may not be aware of on
the site.
Unified customer profile
Data collected from online, offline and offsite sources to create a
single view of the customer. Enterprise tag management draws
data from these typically siloed domains for distribution across
marketing execution systems to optimize the customer experience.
Workflow governance
Controls internal risks stemming from tagging workflows across
teams and agencies. Enterprise tag management supports
workflow governance by establishing rules for access to tags and
data to support team synergies and data security.
Mini tag management glossary
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Editor’s Note:You did it. Tons of great content in less than 15 minutes—we hope. Thank you for reading,
and look for additional 15-minute guides coming soon from Ensighten.
Ensighten enables global brands to simplify the management of their data and technology investments so they can orchestrate smarter interactions across touch
points. Ensighten’s leading customer data platform delivers enterprise tag management; robust profile creation and management; and powerful omni-channel
data collection capabilities that bridge customer behavior information from web, mobile, digital advertising, Internet of Things (IoT) and offline sources. Using
Ensighten, organizations can leverage rich, first-party customer data and profiles to fuel personalization and enhanced insight using their existing technology
investments. Ensighten delivers industry best privacy and security safeguards, unparalleled scale and performance, and the deep integration with the broader
digital marketing eco-system. Select customers include CDW, Hearst Corp., The Home Depot, Microsoft, State Farm, United Airlines and T-Mobile. Ensighten is
headquartered in San Jose with offices in London, Sydney and San Diego.
Phone: (650) 241-3343 | Email: [email protected] | Twitter: @ensighten | www.ensighten.com
© 2016 Ensighten. All rights reserved. All product and company names are trademarks
or registered trademarks of their respective holders. [v09012016]
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Select Brands Using Modern Enterprise Tag Management