The Global Marketing Engagement Index 2018, created by LEWIS, shows that just over half of the companies in Europe use a tag management tool. In the United States they are doing a little better with 80% of companies making use of tag management, whilst Asian companies are lagging behind with less than 20% of them using tag management tools. This a great shame, because well-organised tag management can help improve the marketing mix.
Tag management offers companies an excellent way to optimise the user experience (UX) of a website. Experts have been observing the positive ROI of tag management systems for years, so it is surprising that the global average use of tag management is so low. By organising tag management and analysis tools well, companies can benefit greatly.
What is tag management?
You have a website because you want to tell customers and future customers what you have to offer. And because customers don’t just find your website automatically, you need to make sure that you are easily found, which can be done through SEO and SEA. If that is effective, and people will be able to find and view your website. This is website visit, however, is when the interaction with your customer really starts.
To find out how a customer views your website (how long they view it for, and where and when they drop out), you can place code on relevant pages of the website. This code then works with external analysis and marketing tools, such as Google AdWords, Analytics and Ad servers. At least, we used to do that. Today, tag management tools make it much easier for us to test the UX of our websites.
A tag management tool can be seen as a container in which you collect all separate tags. This container can be added to all pages invisibly. Where previously a separate piece of code had to be written for each element or functionality you want to add to your site, it now only needs to be done once (and for the most part without the need for a web developer to implement).
Once this container has been set up, anyone can add, remove and manage tags – even without technical knowledge. Subsequently, very useful data is extracted from the activities on the website, such as data from web analysis, a/b testing and conversion tracking. Also, very detailed information can be read through a tag management system, such as how long visitors watched a certain video for.
How does tag management work?
There are many different tag management tools and systems available, both paid and free versions. Some examples of providers are Adobe, IMB, Salesforce and Google. Google offers a very popular, free version called Google Tag Manager.
Here’s how to use Google Tag Manager
Step 1
Create an account via Google Tag Manger.
Step 2
Create a container for the domain name of your website. Note that a new container must be created for each website. Each container collects data for the relevant website with various tags.
Step 3
After you create a container, Google creates a code. Now you only need the help of the website builder as an exception. This code must be placed on every page of the website. This is not visible to the website visitor if he or she is viewing the pages.
Step 4
Now you can create the tags that need to be added to the container. It is very useful that a number of pre created templates already exist, such as AdWords Conversion and Google Analytics. Of course, you can also add tags manually, but that is slightly more complicated.
Step 5
At step 5 you set when which tag should come into action. We call this a rule. If, for example, a visitor has completed a purchase on your website, make sure that they arrive at a (unique) thank you page. The thank you page is the rule and the tag comes into action when the URL of this thank you page is visited. At this step you can also exclude a tag from being activated.
Step 6
In this step you add all created tags to the created container. Google will take you through the process.
Step 7
Google offers the possibility to check the created tags by means of a preview (Save and Preview). This way you can check whether your website is still looking good and whether the tags do what they have to do. If you click on a URL, it will open in a preview window.
Step 8
If you have completed step 7 satisfactorily and everything is working properly, it’s time to publish the tags. The tags can be changed at any time. You can now benefit from good analysis, have the ability to adjust and improve the sales process, and exert more influence on the journey that customers make on your website.
