What Is Tag Management?
Tag management is a new foundational platform that enables marketers to easily connect, manage and unify their digital marketing applications (e.g., web analytics, search engine marketing, email service provider, advertising, social technologies, etc.) without a lot of ongoing development work.
A tag, in this case, is simply another name for a piece of data-collecting code that a vast majority of digital vendors now require their customers to embed on their web pages and mobile apps.
These tags often collect visitor behavior information, but can also be used to launch product functionality such as live chat, advertising or surveys.
With tag management, marketers or developers deploy one single tag on their pages – a master tag, so to speak – and then use an intuitive web interface to add, edit or remove any additional vendor tags in a fraction of the time it would take via manual software coding.
Many tag management solutions have a “tag marketplace” that enables marketers to click on a vendor logo, add their account details and other information, decide which sites and pages to load the tag on and hit publish. The vendor solution is automatically deployed via that master tag without touching the web pages.
Tag management also works with mobile apps, where the same agility applies – install the tag management solution once and reduce the cycles needed to change analytics data points or deploy mobile solutions.
The real star of tag management, however, is something called “the data layer” — the behind-the-scenes data that drives customer interactions in web, mobile and other digital channels.
The data layer resides between the application layer, comprised of various mission-critical digital solutions, and the experience layer that users interact with. Through the creation and optimization of this data layer (via tag management), organizations can easily standardize the data definitions used by each application, which enables them to sync their applications more easily.
