Tag Management
Tag Management is an element in online marketing to automatically exchange tags with the help of special containers without having to intervene in the programming of a website.
Significance of tags
Tags are short code snippets used to track the activities of visitors to a website. They are usually provided by third parties, such as advertisers or affiliate marketing. There are different types of tags.
Counter Tags
With the help of counter tags (english: counting pixels) it is very easy to understand how many page views of a website originate from the same user.
Conversion Tags
This type of tags determines how many conversions are registered on a website. This includes, for example, sales, newsletter registrations or the request for further information on the offer. The conversion tag enables the advertiser to assign the conversion to a particular advertising measure and thus assess the success of the campaign on the one hand, but also to draw conclusions about necessary changes in the advertising strategy on the other hand.
Remarketing Tags
Remarketing tags are used to identify recurring users. In the context of advertising strategies, this makes it possible to address these visitors in an even more targeted way and to persuade them to convert.
Container Tags
They are the basis of day management. A container tag is a kind of placeholder code. This only needs to be integrated into the website or the respective sub-pages once. Afterwards, the container tag can have different values. This can be managed via Tag Management. Depending on which day the advertiser sees fit, he can react accordingly and roll it out automatically without actually intervening in the source code of the site.
Automation through tag management
Tag management can be used to determine the content of the container tag. This even happens automatically with the appropriate configuration. For example, the called-up URL can be evaluated. If this contains a particular component, the corresponding tag is delivered. A typical example is the evaluation of the URL on the appearance of the "Thank you for your order" page in the ordering process of an online shop. It is the sign of a conversion that triggers an appropriate conversion tag. In this case, you work with stored rules that trigger a certain day on the basis of different events. Often these rules are much more complicated than just the evaluation of URLs. For example, HTTP referrers, variables, string constants, random numbers, and other events can be included.
Advantages of Tag Management
Tag Management plays an important role in online marketing. The automatic delivery of the tags by means of rules saves entrepreneurs an enormous amount of time and costs, because only a fraction of the effort is required compared to manual changes. In addition, the entrepreneur avoids the problem that he has to call upon an IT specialist for every day change, which by nature is not readily available. The container tags are set up once and can then be easily managed and changed by the tag management system. At the same time, this makes you independent of IT releases, which often set the signal for changes to the code of the website, especially in larger companies. Further advantages of tag management are to be mentioned:
- Test of the correct function of newly created tags easily possible via live system
- Overview of all tags in use
- Availability of pre-defined tags for many providers possible, without having to code
- Optimization of loading time
For example, Google offers the Google Tag Manager service for tag management.