In this lesson, we will cover some theory about tag management systems and discover
what they actually are, how they fit into your organization and why they can improve
internal communication within your company.
All the more coming up right after this.
Hi there and welcome to another video of measureschool.com where we teach you the data driven way of
digital marketing.
Now last lesson we talked about how to install Google Tag manager correctly.
Before we dive in with actual tag deployments, I want to cover a little bit more theory in
this lesson where we are gonna discover how Google Tag Manager fits into our existing
technology stack and in our organization.
So bear with me, the next part will be a little bit more fun because we get to deploy actual
tags.
But the theory is very important so you get the expectations right when using Google Tag
Manager.
As always if you want to test your knowledge, then head over to measureschool.com/lesson3
where we have a quiz prepared for you.
You can do that after the lesson to be sure that you have understood everything.
We've got lots to cover.
So let's dive in.
All right, today we are gonna start out by discovering what is Google Tag Manager exactly?
And Google Tag Manager is really just a tag management system which backs the question
what is a tag management system?
Well let's go over to a little example here.
Let's say you are part of an organization that expands over many countries and therefore
has many different websites.
And you are a marketing manager and are asked to install marketing tags on these different
websites.
Marketing tags are really just these little JavaScript codes that you get from marketing
vendors such as Edward's, Facebook, also Google Analytics which ask you to install these JavaScript
snippets in order to track the user behavior.
In the end, this data will help you to optimize your campaign, find out more about the user
behavior or if your user has bought your product or not.
But in most cases, the marketing vendor first of all sends it over to the online marketing
department which is tasked to install this in order to get the data.
But in most cases, the marketing department doesn't have the appropriate access to the
website because it needs to be actually installed inside of the code.
So they contact their IT department or technical person within their organization in order
to get this code installed.
Now depending on the maturity of the IT department there might be some questions that might come
up.
For example what is the function of the tag, where should it be placed?
Which data should be transferred over to the marketing vendor and are there any exceptions
that we need to handle or should we just install this tag on all the pages.
Hopefully these questions get asked and handled before we start our actual tag deployment
where the IT goes in and places the codes on your website.
Now again depending on the size of the organization, this can take in a small company between a
few hours to some days or in bigger company up to weeks or months even because the marketing
code might be a new requirement that comes up which needs to be managed, put into the
IT queue and appropriately built into the platform, be QA'd before it actually appears
on the website and is ready to transfer the data on to the marketing vendor.
But even then once the tag is installed on the page, you might ask the question who is
responsible for this tag now that is on the website.
What if we need to remove it or change it around.
Do we have to go through this whole process again which might be very cumbersome and time-consuming.
Also there is no real documentation there, who keeps tab on which tags are deployed and
how do we handle the problem of updating codes if you want to keep up with the feature set
that the marketing vendor offers us.
So there are a lot of headaches surrounding marketing tags and with tag management systems
we have a solution to our problem.
It would look like this.
A tag management system would insert itself between the online marketing department and
the IT I would say and help us deploy marketing tags on these websites.
So how would it look like?
The online marketer plus the IT department can take the initiative to deploy a new tag
through the framework of the tag management system.
Questions such as function, placement, data and exceptions get answered by default and
we will be able to deploy a marketing tag in a more timely manner on to our websites
which makes the whole process faster and more efficient.
Once the tags are on the pages, we can divert responsibility for updating and managing these
tags through the tag management system which saves the resources and makes our platform
more future-proof so all in all a great solution for helping us manage our marketing tags efficiently
on one or more websites.
How does a tag management system actually work?
Well on the one side it helps us to consolidate marketing codes.
If you don't have a tag management solution installed, you have different tracking codes
installed on your website anything from general marketing tracking codes to retargeting and
conversion codes, which will be transferred in a tag management solution into one container
snippet so you have to only install one container snippet and through that container you will
be able to deploy our different marketing tags, which by the way can also lead to faster
loading of your page because they are loaded asynchronously.
On the other hand a tag management system gives us a backend or a graphical user interface
through which we can manage and deploy our future marketing tags.
So there are many useful functionalities which makes it easier and more efficient to deploy
such tags with templates for example being built in by default.
A debugging console which lets us QA our codes and a built-in user management to collaborate
efficiently, but these are only some of the awesome features of a tag management system
such Google Tag Manager and we will get into much more detail once we start using this
tool.
So tag management solution really helps us on the one hand with technical abilities,
but also on the people side.
So let's go first with the technical side.
Here we have a consolidation of marketing tags.
This would clean up our code because we only have to deploy one marketing tag, keeps the
marketing requirements on the IT side separately from our application code and deploys our
marketing tags asynchronously which can lead to increased site speed.
We are also delegating a lot of responsibilities of keeping tags up to date through the tag
management system with features like templates.
And last but not least, we have a central management console where we can see and document
all our different tags and understand under which circumstances which data is transferred
on to the marketing vendor.
But a tag management system helps with much more because on the people side, we will see
more efficient communication.
We get everybody on the same page by using one terminology that ask the right questions
for the right people so we are all on the same page and can work together more efficiently.
This is especially true for the tension that sometimes arises between the IT and the marketing
department when it comes to deploying marketing related codes on the website.
So tag management system really help us on the communication part but also makes it overall
faster and efficient to deploy any marketing related tracking because of the built-in features
which can save your time and valuable resources on the marketing and IT side.
Last but not least, Google Tag Manager gives us a little bit of a framework that we need
to follow in order to deploy tags consistently so it helps us to build processes within an
organization which is obviously also very important for consistent data quality.
I don't want to lie.
There are different tag management systems out there besides Google Tag Manager which
differ in the types of integration they have to marketing vendors, the convenience that
you can use them with and the overall technologies that they work together with.
So I urge you to take a look around and see what other tag management systems can do for
you.
Now I use mostly Google Tag Manager and one strong agreement that it is free to use, but
the most important thing is that you have a tag management system installed and are
using it for your tracking deployment.
There you have it, a quick overview over the theory behind Google Tag Manager that is important
to understand for an effective use as well, so the expectations are set correctly.
As always, if you want to test your knowledge head over to measureschool.com/lesson3.
We have a little bit of a quiz prepared for you.
And upon submission, we will send you some more resources that you can dig deeper into
if you choose to do so.
Now in our lesson number four, we are gonna actually get into the nitty-gritty of deploying
tags with Google Tag Manager.
This will be a little bit more of a tutorial part.
So head over to the next video over there and hopefully I will see you there.
My name is Julian, till next time.