How can a Tag Management System help you collect your users' data?

Tags are essential for marketing performance analysis, but their recent multiplication on the web has made them a real chore. If it helps marketers know their audience better, it also complexifies tag management to the point where it becomes more interesting for businesses to outsource this task. 

How does a tag management system work? How to implement a TMS? Why does your company need one? Which one should you use? We will not discuss today the implementation of a TMS on your website. We will answer all of these questions in this article and give you clear insights on TMS to help you determine whether or not this system suits your needs.

From tags to the tag
management system

Knowing the complexity of tagging, you may wonder how a tag management system could help you. If you can still report tags manually, why do you need to implement a TMS?

What is a web tag?

There are so many different tags, but we are only interested today in website tags or web tags. Those tags are pieces of code that allow the gathering of the user's information. It informs you of the user’s behavior online to help you build a marketing strategy tailored to their needs. 

Lately, you may have heard about pixels. We will set up an easy way of discrimination to avoid any misunderstanding. Listen very carefully: a pixel is a tag, but a tag is not a pixel. Tricky, isn’t it? 

There are other forms of tag that you may be willing to use, but note that they are often used indifferently in a marketing context.

What is tag management?

A Tag Management System or TMS to be brief is a platform that helps you quickly gather and connect tags. You manage all your tags by hand? Let’s move up a rung. 

Rather than having tens of tags on a page, which often complexifies or distorts data analysis, tag management allows you to deploy one optimized tag that will gather all the information needed. This one tag is called a master tag. For once, you’re not the one to master; the tag is. It also gives you the ability to manage, add, remove or change tags from a single platform, and god knows that any simplification is good for business. 

In a nutshell, we can say that the more your business online grows, the more tags you have on your website. This causes two main issues: 

• It becomes harder to manage them all manually for each separate page 
• Your website’s performance starts to decline as some old tags become outdated, others are useless as they gather the same information…

A TMS will help you reduce the complexity of your IT tasks, limit the risks of making mistakes that distort your website’s performance, and indeed facilitate tag analysis. 

How does A TAG MANAGEMENT
SYSTEM work?

To implement a tag management system wisely, there are some steps you should follow:

• Determine the most relevant tags you want to track. Think about it: the more tags you track, the more details you will gather on your users, but the more complex the operations will be. 

• Choose the tag management system that suits your company’s needs. You have to choose one system over the others. How to? Well, consider this time:
  - The compatibility of the TMS with your other analytic tools
  - Checking data privacy
  - The functionalities the TMS offers

• Implement a data layer: a data layer helps information go from your website to your tag management system. It is a data structure that processes data from a page to your analytic tools and TMS.
  
  
• Conduct A/B tests: it allows you to identify unnecessary errors and unexpected bugs before launching your TMS. 

Which Tag Management System to start with?

If you want to implement a TMS but get lost with the variety of systems on the market, you can start with one of the following:

• Google Tag Manager: it is a free software. It can be interesting to use Google TMS if you work with Google’s tools since there are many bridges between these digital tools. Be careful: Google Tag Manager can be challenging to use at first.  

• Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager: this TMS is easy to implement if you are used to working with Adobe. Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager is known for being one of the easiest TMS to use. Be careful: you have to pay for this TMS. It is included in the Adobe Marketing Cloud purchase. A free trial is available. 

There are other platforms, and we bet there is one tailored to your needs.

3 reasons to outsource
your tagging strategy

1. Reduce the costs related to tagging. You do not have to call a developer to help your company develop its digital tagging; the TMS does everything. Whether to help you conceive or implement your tagging strategy, the TMS makes you save precious resources that you can thus use for your business.
   
   
2. Optimize your performance: by reducing the number of tags, you can have a better loading time for your pages. Remember that the more tags on your page, the more likely there will be bugs. 
   
   
3. Implement a tagging strategy in a centralized and straightforward way. The use of a TMS allows you to insert one tag to track a lot of information. Thus, you can reduce reliance on your IT department and give more independence to your marketing team.

TAG MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: a must-have
for your digital campaigns

We bet you already track your user’s information to learn from their behavior and enhance the UX of your pages. Using a TMS can be valuable software to optimize your efforts on tag analysis. 

It helps reduce both your page load time and the risks associated with mismanaging your tags. The ball is in your court now. Learn from your tags and set things right. You may have other questions on that specific topic? Don't hesitate to contact our dedicated team, we'll be pleased to help you.