A tag management system helps manage the lifecycle of

digital marketing Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Its development duri ...

tags (sometimes referred to as ''tracking pixels'' or ''

web beacon A web beaconAlso called web bug, tracking bug, tag, web tag, page tag, tracking pixel, pixel tag, 1×1 GIF, or clear GIF. is a technique used on web pages and email to unobtrusively (usually invisibly) allow checking that a user has accessed s ...

s''), used to track activity on digital properties, such as websites and web applications. As tag management systems have grown in sophistication they've become powerful tools to manage the rich data coming from the interactions between a user, their browser and one or more digital property/s. This data can be fed to marketing and analytics tools. It can also be used to make dynamic changes to the website or application.

Functionality

Digital marketing tags are used to track usage of web sites, video content, and mobile apps. Such tracking data can support

web analytics Web analytics is the measurement, data collection, collection, analysis, and reporting of web Data (computing), data to understand and optimize web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool fo ...

, campaign analytics, audience measurement, personalization,

A/B testing A/B testing (also known as bucket testing, split-run testing, or split testing) is a user experience research methodology. A/B tests consist of a randomized experiment that usually involves two variants (A and B), although the concept can be also ...

, ad servers,

behavioral retargeting Behavioral retargeting (also known as behavioral remarketing, or simply, retargeting) is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is targeted to consumers based on their previous internet behaviour. Retargeting tags online ...

, and conversion tracking. The main advantages of a tag management system is that it allows non-developer types to action a multitude of different tasks on a website or application whilst improving performance by reducing written code. It does this by replacing a multitude of tags - historically managed by a developer - with a single ''container tag'' which sits across all areas of the property. The tag management system is then accessed separately (normally via a website) to prioritize and "fire" individual tags as appropriate based on business rules, navigation events and known data. Typical functionality includes testing environment ( sandboxing), audit trail and version control, ability to A/B test different solutions, tag deduplication, and role-based access to data. It helps the data analytics to use data easily.

Benefits

Typically cited benefits of tag management systems include: * Agility: Reduced reliance on technical resources and reduced dependency on IT cycles confers greater agility to business users. * Performance: Reduced page load times thanks to asynchronous tag loading, conditional tag loading and tag timeout functionality. * Cost savings: Ability to deduplicate tags used to attribute commission. * Data control: Ability to control data leakage to third-parties and comply with data privacy legislation (cookie consent, do not track). Tag managers also provide another layer of abstraction for managing the complexity of large websites. * Safe preview: Some tag managers, such as Google Tag Manager and Ensighten, include a preview mode which allows checking for formatting and security issues before deploying tags to production.

Notable providers

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

* Ensighten *

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

* Matomo * Scale8 *

Signal In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The ''IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing'' ...

* Tealium{{cite web , url= http://tealium.com/products/enterprise-tag-management/ , title= Tealium iQ , publisher= Tealium , access-date= 2015-02-12 *

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

References

Web analytics