Would You Benefit from a Tag Management System?

Ask any online professional about analytics, and you may spend hours hearing about their vital importance in the pursuit of Web success.

One secret to garnering especially meaningful analytical insights is by breaking down data into different divisions to see more accurate reports of specific content categories. This process is achieved by using tags.

Tags are metadata keywords assigned to a piece of information or content on the Web that describe the item and make it more easily found when users go browsing and searching for it.

Tags are most common on blog-based or other content-heavy websites as a way to group, manage and track similar information. The problem, especially for less savvy content publishers, is that after a while, sites and pages will end up cluttered with unorganized tags, which sort of defeats the purpose. Because of this, analytics researchers are met with a mess of disorganized data thanks to duplicate, outdated or non-functioning tags that can give marketers and site owners inaccurate information, and that's no help to anyone.

Enter tag management systems. These services come in and clean up the clutter created by disorganized, user-generated tags. Using a management system allows content publishers to collect all of their campaign's tags into one container tag and then manage and maintain them in a single application.

According to TagMan, the benefits of such a system include greater accuracy in analytics results, more efficient tag management with a user-friendly interface, more control over all of a site's tags, improved performance in page load times and serving tags to visitors, and greater flexibility in adding and testing new tags.

Unfortunately, it seems that many website owners tend to undervalue the worth of tag management; but for prolific content publishers (anyone from enterprise-level ecommerce companies to very busy bloggers), tag management systems are the easiest and perhaps most effective way to keep track of the performance of various content categories.

Many major companies have come to terms with the usefulness of tag management systems, however; currently, TagMan works with brands like Travelocity, Virgin Atlantic, Subaru and Kellogg's, among many others.

Department store group Debenhams turned to TagMan while in the process of switching analytics providers. The site's infrastructure was supplied and hosted by IBM, making any code changes a "delayed process." To resolve this concern, Debenhams implemented the TagMan tag management system into its website so that it would be able to apply new online marketing technology without having to wait on code changes from the back-end infrastructure.

The single container tag used by services like TagMan replaces all on-site tags used to manage and track online marketing technologies; instead, these tags are stored in a tag management system that allows site owners to make immediate changes in a single, user-friendly, browser-based interface, never altering the code on the website. Ultimately, this allows content publishers to more effectively manage and track existing technologies and instantly install new ones. This improved efficiency saves site owners time, while giving them more accurate and insightful data from analysis and greater control over the way content is categorized on their websites.

In addition to TagMan, there are a number of tag management systems available, including UberTags, Tealium and Ensighten.