To create a championship-winning enterprise, you need to hire an all-star digital team. Its starting lineup should include skilled content producers, market researchers and IT superstars, in addition to MVP-caliber marketers.
Oftentimes, however, teammates (employees) are so focused on their own specific tasks, that accomplishing cross department projects or initiatives can be time consuming, if not frustrating and counterproductive.
A marketer, for example, may want to leverage a new analytics program, but is unable to do so until the IT department responds to his or her request for adding the new program's required code (a.k.a. tag) to the company's website. The bigger your enterprise is, the more tags your team typically expects the IT department to implement, which leads to a bottleneck of IT tickets that can take months to complete. If this sounds familiar, it may be time to draft a superstar agile enough to bring your team together.
Tag management systems help enterprises run more efficiently, because they allow multiple departments to add tags to websites without going through their IT departments. This shortens the time to going live so marketers can begin leveraging new functionality quicker and frees up IT time for tasks that may be considered higher priorities.
A Forrester Research study found that it takes an hour or less for 53 percent of tag management users to implement new or revised tags; while only 8 percent of respondents said they could do so in the same time frame prior to using a tag management system. Comparatively, 22 percent of respondents claim that it took them several weeks to implement new or revised tags before they began leveraging a tag management system.
In addition to saving enterprises time (and therefore money), Erik Bratt, VP of marketing at popular tag management provider Tealium, says that tag management systems can improve website performance, as having tags organized in one place makes it easy to identify and remove tags that aren't being used, therefore speeding up page-load times. The ease of implementation also makes it simple for marketers to test vendors against one another, so they can choose a platform that will help them attain the best results without wasting resources. One big question remains, what type of digital functions do tag management systems support?
Tag management systems can be leveraged to integrate nearly any type of third-party code onto an enterprise's website. Forrester's study reveals that a whopping 88 percent of tag management system users leverage the platforms for Web analytics, which can include integrations with popular vendors like Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, Kissmetrics and Webtrends, to name but a few.
However, analytics is far from the only digital function a tag management system supports. Other uses include those for search marketing, ad serving, affiliate marketing, behavioral targeting and testing. Likewise, tag management platforms can be used to integrate audience measurement, social media, voice of the customer feedback (surveys) and recommendation services into websites. In fact, the straightforwardness of tag management systems has led companies to leverage more independent platforms than non-tag management system users, as an Econsultancy study shows that tag management system users average 19 tags on their sites compared to manual taggers averaging just 10 site tags.
When it comes to selecting your enterprise's newest superstar, there are a few items to consider and vendor neutrality and ease-of-use certainly top the list.
The purpose of a tag management system is to allow your team to bypass IT. If a system is too complicated to use, then most professionals will need technical help, which brings them back to where they were before implementing a tag management system. Conversely, vendor neutrality is vital because it allows businesses to be flexible in choosing their third-party providers and in testing outsourced services against one another. Other factors to take into consideration, however, include the system's performance and scalability, customer support offerings and cost. So, just like professional sports teams do extensive homework on prospects, it is important to research your enterprise's potential superstars before committing.