As your online business grows in both size and scope, so does the volume of the underlying code to make your website functional, to serve your customers, and to track your performance. Managing both the functionality and performance of your site is a major headache for your marketing team and diverts your IT resources from the higher-level tasks they should be focused on, as they are continuously delegated the tedious tasks of manually retagging each page of their organization’s multiple sites. Also, the more tags are added to a page, the more performance is degraded—dragging down your site load times. So, the irony is that the more useful and relevant your site becomes, the worse it may actually perform. Your customers have high expectations regarding performance; if a page does not load quick enough, frustrated visitors will click their way around in hopes to refresh the page, or just abandon your site for another.
Why all the tags anyway?
To provide additional functionality to your website, JavaScript tags have become de rigueur. You want, need, and must have these tags to support almost all of the solutions marketers use on a day-to-day basis. If you use Google anything – Analytics, AdWords, Adsense, etc. – then this applies directly to you. Testing, search marketing, and social media are just a few additional platforms this functionality supports. Since many websites require using multiple page tags, and in most companies IT is needed for adding or changing tags on the website, marketers grow increasingly frustrated with delays in implementation and their lack of control. Enter the Tag Management System (TMS) world to empower the marketer and give them control.
How can a TMS save your site?
A Tag Management System, such as Ensighten Manage, frees you up from having to code individual tags embedded on each page of your site by streamlining the deployment through a singular application to manage all of these tags. In addition, with a TMS, code loads asynchronously in the page header, deploying only the applications relevant to that page and user, therefore significantly decreasing the load time of any page. Lastly, a TMS will also prevent bad code and 3rd party code from slowing down your site and give the marketer amplified data and tracking clarity.
Testing and implementing new applications
Every modern marketer is looking for their company’s version of the ideal “online marketing suite” – the custom combination of marketing applications needed to run their business, including analytics, testing, voice of customer solutions, ad tracking, social media, and much more. Therefore, it is essential to your organization to have a smooth quality assurance and rollout process to add (and test) these applications and functionality to your online marketing mix. This should also allow tag deployments and modifications to be tested in a cookie-controlled live production environment.
By testing in the live environment, you’ll be able to ensure that differences between the test and live environment don’t cause problems while keeping the site smoothly running at the same time. This can all be done on the marketer’s time, eliminating the bottleneck of waiting for IT, agency or vendor resources. The ability to test your changes can save significant time, money and energy. In addition, there is versioning rollback to provide a safeguard against unintentional errors. So in a nutshell, if a change made by the marketing department or an outside vendor is unwanted or unnecessary, the site can be reverted to the previous version with a few clicks.
How Nestle Purina PetCare changed the way it manages its online presence
NestlĂ© Purina PetCare, the world’s largest pet food producer, manages dozens of web sites, has specific requirements across each of the sites, and works with over a dozen agencies using a multitude of interactive marketing technologies that required constant deployment and customization of their tagging. With such complexity, even making simple changes on its sites could take several months and it was difficult to measure campaign effectiveness on a global level for its multi-million dollar marketing campaigns. Spurred on by a desire to migrate its web analytics technology, Purina decided it should be able to centrally manage the tagging and code customizations for all sites and maintain standards company-wide. In addition, due to some of the complexity of flash-based applications, Purina needed a solution robust enough to handle the intricacies of tagging compiled code.
Deploying a Tag Management System allowed Purina and its agencies to have complete control over how page tags are added, customized and removed from the site independent of the technology that a site has been built in. Additionally, the TMS provided marketer-level access and complete enterprise-workflow management to streamline the process of deploying highly customized tagging without the need for IT and/or development resources. Purina also plans to use its TMS system for implementing Voice of Customer (VOC) and testing and optimization. Guy Fish, Assistant Interactive Brand Manager at Purina, remarked “I am in complete control of my tagging; adding tags, customizing tags, changing tags anywhere on my site at any time. The cost savings realized in hours spent by IT and our agencies on analytics in development and QA cycles has been innumerable.”
