What is a Tag Management System and why do you need it?

February 14, 2016

Tags on your website help to monitor what visitors are doing on your website and measure how many visitors are doing certain actions. Tags can help you to optimize your online marketing and are an important part of any marketing toolbox. This blog looks into the role of tags and how Google Tag Manager can be used to make the process of setting up tags straightforward.

What are tags?

Tags help you understand who is coming to your website, what they are doing whilst they are on your website and why they leave. A tag is a form of code that exists on your website and tracks actions that visitors perform on your website. For example, you can track when a user clicks in a sign up box for your newsletter, and which page on your website drove this action. Using this information you can determine which pages are, or are not driving conversions and evaluate why this may be. This data can help you make more educated decisions about the placement of certain converting actions on your website and test the success of various Call to Actions.

Tags can also be applied to your website to help serve appropriate advertising on your website and to cookie visitors so they can be retargeted with advertisements promoting your brand. These tags help you to understand the success of your online advertising and social efforts so you can make educated decisions about how to proceed with your media spend. For example, you can measure whether or not your Facebook dynamic retargeting campaign is driving higher conversions than your Adwords Display and move budget around accordingly.

What is a Tag Management System?

When tags first came of age, they were incredibly time consuming. The manual process required technical support from a developer and could take anywhere from a day to a week to implement. Using a tag management system such as Google Tag Manager speeds up the process significantly and requires no support from a developer for the more simple tags. A marketing expert can set up and fire a tag in under 30 minutes. The use of a tag management system not only makes tagging a much more efficient process, but also helps to avoid mistakes through human error.

Google Tag Manager

Google has developed a free tag management system, Google Tag Manager, that lets you keep track of tags and configure the rules of how each tag should work on your website. Google Tag Manager has a tag that you apply globally on your website that replaces your Google Analytics code and Google Adwords code - it acts on behalf of each Google product. Google Tag Manager has a great user experience and makes it very easy to implement, adjust and remove tags.

What tag management system do you use? Tell us more over on our LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Written by
Alexander Rauser
Alexander Rauser

CEO

Alexander Rauser is the author of Boardroom Guide to Digital Accountability and Digital Strategy: A Guide to Digital Business Transformation, and creator of the DSX Program, a digital strategy and transformation program for Enterprises.

Related Articles

Subscribe to our blog

Subscribe to our blog to receive relevant news and tips about digital transformation, app development, website development, UX, and UI design. Promise we won't spam you.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.