JULY 2016

15-MINUTE GUIDE

Enterprise Tag Management

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“Since JavaScript became the de facto standard for collecting digital data, the quantity of tags that firms have had to manage has exponentially exploded as the number of analytic techniques and digital touch points have grown. Ad hoc processes for managing these tags are not scalable or sustainable…”

Boost Digital Intelligence With Tag Management James McCormick, Forrester Research

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Tag management is important for so many reasons It accelerates marketing, speeds website performance and creates a powerful foundation for unifying siloed marketing technologies and disparate customer data sources —just to name a few.

Ultimately, tag management is the lynchpin for optimizing customer

experiences across all touch points, including web, mobile, kiosks and other

channels, helping to unite and leverage first-party data in ways that few

other applications can. As a newer application, tag management has also

had its challenges: it’s classic “marketing middleware,” meaning that it sits

below many of the sexier marketing execution systems that interface with

customers directly.

Tag management is also a bit of a misnomer—it’s really about data, not

tags—making it harder to grasp. Nevertheless, once marketers and their IT

counterparts understand what enterprise tag management can really do,

a light bulb goes off, and it instantly becomes a must-have solution.

Editor’s Note: We get it—you’re busy. But you still want

great information. That’s why we created this

15-minute guide. Our goal: give you everything

you need to know about tag management (or

at least the core concepts) in a crisp 15 minutes,

depending on your reading speed, of course.

We hope you enjoy this guide. Hurry, the clock

is ticking!

15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management

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These tags usually do one of two things: collect visitor behavior

information or serve some type of product functionality. Tags

are used by a wide cross-section of vendors, including analytics,

advertising, affiliate marketing, marketing automation, live

chat and much, much more. So what’s the problem with tags?

During the last decade, tags became the de facto method for

data collection among nearly all digital marketing vendors. As

the number of marketing technologies has exploded, so has the

number of tags, creating a bottleneck between marketing and

IT departments to get the tags deployed, and perpetuating the

siloed nature of marketing, given the fact that each vendor tag

leverages its own proprietary data definitions. In a word, chaos—

but also an opportunity for those who can learn to navigate the

modern digital landscape.

According to ChiefMartec.com, the number of marketing technology vendors grew to 1,876 in 2015, more than double from the previous year, and a 10-fold increase since 2011.

What is a tag? Let’s get this out of the way first. “Tags” are simply snippets of JavaScript code that many third-party digital marketing vendors require their customers to add to their digital properties.

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Enterprise tag management systems began to emerge in 2009

in response to the growth in tag-based solutions and increasingly

long deployment cycles. For every new and updated solution

marketers wanted to deploy, the greater the reliance on already

overburdened IT staff to manually code these tags into the

website. These deployments could weeks, months or even years

depending on code freezes and other factors.

Enter tag management, which enables both marketing and

technical users to add, edit or remove any tag within minutes

through a convenient web interface. Once the tag management

system is implemented, marketers simply click on a vendor logo,

add some account details, specify when to load the tag and

where, and hit publish. The tag is automatically deployed onto

the web page without any coding. Tag management systems

have out-of-the-box integrations within the digital marketing

ecosystem, with some enterprise solutions boasting as many as

1,000+ turnkey integrations.

Tag management accomplishes another nifty trick—because

the tag serves as the convergence point for visitor data, tag

management, housing all the tags, has access to all the data, and

can easily correlate visitor IDs to help create a unified customer

view, something we’ll discuss more later on.

How does enterprise tag management work?

15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management

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One of the most important aspects of tag management systems is

the creation of the data layer, which refers to a layer of available data

on your website(s) that can be leveraged for analytics and marketing

action. This data can be found in numerous places and sources—in

the meta tags of your pages, customer browser details, cookies,

URL tracking parameters, JavaScript objects and more. A data layer

creates a common data dictionary, ensuring that each application

is leveraging the same definitions. This makes it easier to harmonize

technologies, correlate data and, ultimately, drive action.

Geeking out: A few words about the data layer

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Accelerate Marketing Deployments

Marketers can launch key solutions and campaigns faster and

easier than ever before. This accelerates time-to-revenue

dramatically.

Enhance Site Performance

Tag management removes bloated code and creates intelligent

rules for tag loading. It also provides a high-speed architecture for

tag delivery. This serves to increase page-load speed, which can

directly impact conversions and revenue.

Leverage best of breed solutions

Tag management helps marketers avoid “vendor lock-in” by

making it easy to add or remove any solution. This ultimately

gives them flexibility to use the solutions that are right for

their business. Instead of investing in a proprietary marketing

cloud, organizations can assemble their own custom marketing

technology stack.

Ensure privacy compliance and data governance

Today’s technology stack is a swirling vortex of unmanaged

customer data. Enterprise tag management makes it possible to

control data leakage from the browser, and ensure full compliance

with consumer and global privacy preferences.

Drive next-generation customer interactions

Marketers can turn to enterprise tag management to establish a

foundation for creating and optimizing rich, first-party customer

profiles, which can be shared across marketing execution systems

to drive real-time action.

Five core benefits of tag management Enterprise tag management delivers an inordinate number of business benefits for just one solution, from accelerated tag deployments to data governance. With that said, here are five highlights:

“The speed. I can't get over the speed. What would have taken developers weeks or months, took days."

Tim Curtis, Jack Stack Barbecue, referring to tag deployments

15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management

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The same nifty benefits that apply to traditional web sites and mobile

websites also apply to mobile apps. Once the tag management system is

baked into the mobile app, marketers and developers can deploy solutions

or adjust key data points without having

to rebuild the app and re-certify it through

the platform provider (iOS, Android). True

enterprise tag management systems deliver

a powerful combination of out-of-the-box

lifecycle metrics, mobile tag management, and real-time optimization and

testing. This makes it easy to jump-start any mobile marketing initiative,

as well as better engage visitors in a mobile environment.

More than half of digital business professionals (57 percent) say they do not use analytics within their mobile apps, according to Forrester Research (2014).

What about mobile?

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Free Offerings Tag management tools

offered at no cost have

value for small businesses

managing a handful of vendor tags

on comparatively simple digital

infrastructures. This approach to tag

delivery (so-called “client-side” tag

management) has limited scalability

and data security, making these

tools unsuitable for mid- and large-

sized businesses. They also offer no

direct data ownership, service-level

agreements or dedicated customer

support. Tag managers that are bundled

into marketing vendor products are not

truly free, and also lack many of the key

capabilities mentioned here.

Basic Packages

Offerings from companies

that cater primarily to

the mid-market deliver

more advanced capabilities than the

free tools, but they rely on the same

client-side methodology and limit much

of their focus to templated interfaces

and simpler, web-specific use cases,

instead of providing true omni-channel

support. These packages have significant

limitations particularly when it comes

to scalability, customization, mature

workflow, data privacy and support for

use cases spanning mobile apps and

offsite data collection.

Enterprise Tag Management

True enterprise tag

management systems add

the full range of capabilities that mature

marketers need for today’s management

of an ever-growing set of digital

technologies. For a tag management

system to be truly enterprise, it must

support any tag, at any scale, in any

channel. It must be able to handle the

explosion of marketing data available to

today’s marketer in a way that promotes

data ownership and keeps data as secure

and private as possible.

Three tiers of tag management While tag management has emerged as fundamental to enterprise digital marketing, a wide variation in capabilities has produced a three-tiered market:

15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management

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Intuit saw an immediate 30 percent increase in business

performance by using enterprise tag management to

streamline technology deployments, boost site performance

and drive better user experiences.

US Bank reduced tag implementation time by 95 percent,

and improved site targeting by 25 percent through better

management of data and technology.

TUI eliminated marketing silos and is driving more consis-

tent and relevant customer interactions across brand touch

points—desktop, mobile web and mobile app—through a

unified customer view.

TD Bank reduced page load time by 50 percent and improved

marketing attribution by using enterprise tag management

to speed deployments and enhance multi-channel attribution.

The ROI of enterprise tag management An enterprise tag management system can increase revenue, reduce costs and create new opportunities for growth.

United realized an eight-digit ROI within 10 months

by unifying fragmented data sources to gain a

unified view of the customer.

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Then enterprise tag management may be for you. Here are seven

sure-fire reasons you might need tag management:

Are you ready for enterprise tag management? Does your IT staff run and hide when you approach them about deploying a new tag? Is your site getting slower and slower thanks to tag proliferation? Are you still engaged in siloed marketing?

It’s going on three months and that retargeting advertising

solution you contracted for is still not deployed across your

network of sites—delaying time to revenue.

Your IT department gives you an estimate of five to six

months to deploy your new enterprise analytics solution.

You lack any usage metrics for your native mobile app,

making it difficult to optimize the app to drive better

engagement.

Your website performance is beginning to slow, thanks in

part to the proliferation of tags.

You have no easy way to control whether your tags are

exposing customer data, violating consumer privacy

preferences or operating outside your privacy policy.

You have no way of giving granular tag control to different

groups, both internally and externally.

You have no easy way to create a single customer view for

driving action, including unifying onsite, off-site and offline

data sources.

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15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management

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“Historically, viewing a single customer journey was impossible. (Tag management) allows us to

have a single identifier across all brands.”

Adrian Maguire, TUI Group, as told to Exchange Wire

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The best enterprise tag management systems will continuously

evolve to support the new omni-channel customer journeys. The

focus will be on helping the marketing and IT teams integrate

technology and data to deliver seamless experiences across any

touch points, leveraging rich, first-party customer data and profiles.

Enterprise tag management delivers those capabilities to any

organization. Additionally tag management’s role in securing

data and ensuring consumer privacy as rules become stricter

across international borders will become increasingly vital to the

enterprise. In short, enterprise tag management is now more

important than ever. It has entrenched itself as a foundational

piece of the modern marketing technology stack.

The evolution of enterprise tag management Enterprise marketing teams today engage large and diverse customer groups in complex digital environments. That ecosystem will only become more complex with the pace of future technology innovation.

Onsite Off-site

OfflineData Providers

15-Minute Guide to Enterprise Tag Management

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Tags

Image pixels or snippets of JavaScript code that nearly all

digital marketing vendors use to either: (1) measure visitor

behavior, or (2) serve product functionality. Tags help drive many

third-party applications, from web analytics to advertising and

social media sharing.

First-party data

Visitor interactions collected directly on the website, mobile

app or other company-owned channel. This is the richest, most

extensible and actionable source of data.

Global whitelisting

Prevents tags from firing, except for those on the whitelist. This

is one of the key ways that enterprise tag management can be

leveraged to secure data and protect consumer privacy with rules

governing access to tags and data.

Piggybacking

Tags chained together by appending them to existing tags

already in place on the website without making any changes

to the page code. Piggybacking can add dozens of tags and

introduce services that the site owner may not be aware of on

the site.

Unified customer profile

Data collected from online, offline and offsite sources to create a

single view of the customer. Enterprise tag management draws

data from these typically siloed domains for distribution across

marketing execution systems to optimize the customer experience.

Workflow governance

Controls internal risks stemming from tagging workflows across

teams and agencies. Enterprise tag management supports

workflow governance by establishing rules for access to tags and

data to support team synergies and data security.

Mini tag management glossary

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Editor’s Note:You did it. Tons of great content in less than 15 minutes—we hope. Thank you for reading,

and look for additional 15-minute guides coming soon from Ensighten.

Ensighten enables global brands to simplify the management of their data and technology investments so they can orchestrate smarter interactions across touch

points. Ensighten’s leading customer data platform delivers enterprise tag management; robust profile creation and management; and powerful omni-channel

data collection capabilities that bridge customer behavior information from web, mobile, digital advertising, Internet of Things (IoT) and offline sources. Using

Ensighten, organizations can leverage rich, first-party customer data and profiles to fuel personalization and enhanced insight using their existing technology

investments. Ensighten delivers industry best privacy and security safeguards, unparalleled scale and performance, and the deep integration with the broader

digital marketing eco-system. Select customers include CDW, Hearst Corp., The Home Depot, Microsoft, State Farm, United Airlines and T-Mobile. Ensighten is

headquartered in San Jose with offices in London, Sydney and San Diego.

Phone: (650) 241-3343 | Email: info@ensighten.com | Twitter: @ensighten | www.ensighten.com

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Select Brands Using Modern Enterprise Tag Management