What is Management
Managing and making changes to tags can be tedious and involve unnecessary red tape. Tag management is a concept that was born out of the increasing need for more agile marketing measurement and tracking ability.
What is Management
The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
On October 1st, Google announced Google Tag Manager, a free tool for managing marketing and tracking tags on your site. I've sensed a lot of confusion around its launch, so I'd like to discuss what tag management is and why it's so powerful.
There are a number of companies that have been providing tag management software as a paid service for years (I'm sure they're wild about Google making it free). I won't discuss the pros and cons of different tag management software offerings, rather, just the concept in general, and some directly actionable tips using Google's service. At the end of the post, I'll include links to some of the other, likely more robust, tag management services.
Tags are snippets of code that usually placed in the of a page which enable 3rd-party tracking, analysis, and reporting. Google Analytics and other analytics platforms are an obvious tag, but remarketing, conversion tracking, affiliates, and advanced customer insight services utilize tags as well.
Tag management is a concept that was born out of the increasing need for more agile marketing measurement and tracking ability. Managing and making changes to tags can be tedious and involve unnecessary red tape.
I hate talking conceptually with this sort of thing, so let's get right to a real-world example. Let's get all up in SEOmoz's business.
Let's take the homepage of SEOmoz. Within the source of the homepage, I can identify a number of tags that would work well with a tag manager. Feel free to take a look for yourself, but it seems like the team at Moz has included:
Optimizely - For CRO testing *Google Tag Manager does not support A/B testing tags at launch, but it's apparently coming soon. For other tag managers, YMMV.
I'm assuming they've got even more tags on conversion pages such as the AdWords conversion snippet and any affiliate marketing tracking pixels.
Emails get sent, changes are added to a massive work queue, meetings are scheduled, sprints are added to, excuses are made, staging servers are updated 3 weeks later with live roll-out scheduled for another 3 weeks, etc.
Tag managers allow marketing to have control over their own little space on a web page. The 6 or 7 tags on any given page are replaced by a single container. That container contains code that listens to rules dictated in the tag manager's backend as to when to fire what tags.
If the Moz team wants to try out a new remarketing service, they can grab the snippet necessary, drop it into the tag manager, set some rules for when it gets fired, and publish live to the site - all in 10 minutes, all without ever getting IT involved.
Keep in mind that there are plenty of sites on the web, especially eCommerce, that are far more complicated than SEOmoz.org by nature. The need for Tag Management is even greater in this situation.
In order to reap the rewards of agility and future simplicity, there are quite a few hurdles and complexities that have to be overcome upfront. For this reason, tag management is simply not worth the effort for everyone. If you...
In case you haven't yet seen Google's 4 minute video explaining the utility and setup of GTM, give this video a look. Afterwards, we'll look at specific customizations that web marketers can make.
GTM offers some nice versioning and debugging features. Additionally, the container blog is an asynchronous JavaScript snippet so it will not effect page load or block other JavaScript.
GTM uses macros and rules to decide when a tag is fired. Macros are just a name-value pair that can be used to build rules around. The value itself, in many cases, is populated in runtime. That is, at the moment the page itself is being built for the user.
Your conversion pages likely have smorgasbord of conversion tracking tags like AdWords, eCommerce analytics snippets, ROI trackers from comparison shopping engines, etc.
A bit more complicated, especially if you're used to Google Analytics events. There are similarities, and you'll likely use them together, but it's best to forget that GA has something called an 'event' for now.
Events can be used to track interactions on a page after the page loads. As an example, if a user interacts with a form on your site, you can push an event. If there are any rules that depend on that event value, the specified tag will fire.
onsubmit="dataLayer.push({'event': 'form_submitted'});">Now, any tags that have a rule setup to fire when the event value's name is 'form_submitted' will do so.
What if we already have a standard Google Analytics onSubmit event set up so that we can track form submissions as a goal? What's the benefit here?
We have to step back and think a bit high level here to understand. A form being submitted on our site is an important occurrence. No matter what services we're using to track our marketing efforts 10 years from now, it's a piece of information we want to track. By using a tag manager and setting this form submission as an event, we remain super flexible in the following scenarios:
Start working with a new affiliate that pays out on form submissions but wants their own pixel to fire? We already have the event setup, just need to setup a rule in the tag manager.
One of your services make an "improvement" to their snippet that requires updating? Piece of cake. We can get it published and live on the site in 5 minutes with a tag manager.
If you want to set a standard company name across your site, for example, you could define it as a Constant String type macro. This would allow you to easily update the string in Google Tag Manager and see it reflected across all the tags that use this macro.
Got a global JavaScript variable that prints out on the page that you'd like to build a rule around? That's what this one is for. To give you a real example:
On my Tumblr, I noticed that, by default, Tumblr prints the tags (as in blog post tags, not marketing tags) in a global variable on the page.
Take this post for example. In the , we see the tags are passed into tumblr_meta_keyboards (Lord only know why the hell they chose to call this variable 'keyboards'. Typo?):
Creating a macro for this allows me to set custom rules for tag firing based on the data in the macro. Pretty easy to write up a rule that fires a custom version of the GA snippet that passes the tags into custom variables when tags are detected. Notice I reference the macro we just created above using the {{macro_name}} syntax in the custom variable line.
To explain a data layer in full opens up a whole can of worms. If you want the full story, Justin Cutroni described it in glorious detail in this post
A data layer is a collection of data on a page that includes any important piece of information from that page in an easy to access format. Imagine the confirmation page on an eCommerce site: you've got transaction details, shipping details, quantities, product IDs, order numbers, etc. It's all scattered about on the page. A data layer stores all that info in a name-value pair in the source code (not printed on the page so the user can see), making it super simple to access by a tag manager.
With tag management and a data layer working together, it's super simple to create a rule that sends your custom variables and segments to however many analytics platforms you use. Tracking logged in user behavior in GA, Mixpanel, and KissMetrics? Create a rule in GTM that pushes all three custom tags if the data layer name 'logged_in' = yes. Piece of cake.
It can be a hefty undertaking to implement a data layer, but the investment upfront can save tons of time in the long run. Most importantly, it allows IT to focus on fixing bugs and improving product, while the marketers don't have to worry about the IT time necessary to implement new tags ever again.
If you happen to have data that you'd like to access and store with macros marked up just right, you might be able to use them in your rules.
If you're lucky enough to have some useful data marked up just so, you might be able to make this work with some rules. This would be nice:
The basic installation of Google Analytics through GTM is really straightforward. By default, you'll utilize an "All Pages" rule that Google provides for default. Simple enough.
If you plan to do funky stuff like send custom variables according to rules you've set, you'll need to use the 'Custom HTML' tag type, and make sure you set a rule to block the traditional snippet from firing:
Apparently, there are further Google Analytics specific enhancements coming later to GTM, so the above methodology may be a lot of work for something that might be a cinch whenever Google gets around to releasing those enhancements.
Tag management is an agile marketers dream. Like Google Analytics did back in 2006, GTM has entered a paid market with a free offering that is a solid product from launch. If GTM follows the GA model, it will continue to improve. There are already a few features slated for future release, like the ability to manage A/B testing snippets. I also have a strong feeling that Google Analytics will be embracing GTM for their upcoming changes to cross-domain tracking, which is currently a very cumbersome process.
If you're interested in tag management but GTM doesn't get the job done, the following is a (hopefully) exhaustive list (credit, again to Justin Cutroni) of the other players in the tag management space. Though I don't have a terrible amount of experience with any, they've been at it for a while and are likely even more powerful than GTM:
About Mike Pantoliano — I write on the SEOmoz and Distilled blogs. I like to focus on web analytics, eCommerce, technical SEO, and site architecture. Follow me on Twitter!
44 Thumbs Up, 0 Thumbs Down Get your social onTweet VisitsN/APageviewsN/AAvg. Time on PageN/ADirect TrafficN/ASearch TrafficN/AReferral TrafficN/AWoot! Pulling some fresh data for you!
So you'd still have to go through them since they are the gatekeepers who control the websites (however much marketing like to think they do!). It's just shifting the problem, not solving it.
However the Byzantine rules big businesses employ with regards to websites aren't Google's fault and it looks like a good tool, and this was a helpful article. I'll just go back to begging developers to make changes now....
I've actually seen, and demonstrated, this in the past on some of the other tag management systems which were out there (and free, I didn't trial the paid solutions at the time as my employer then was using a free version which I noticed have a huge security issue whereby i was able to freely edit anyone's tags and thus demonstrated how this could be used to rewrite the entire website.
One thing that bothers me though, is that they did not include a way to confirm ownership of a site, in Google Webmaster Tools - using the Tag Manager. Since the scipts you put into your tag manager are not triggered before a user is actually on a page, you can not use your GA script to do this. I think this is valuable information, would be cool if you added it to the article!
Also, you really could combine the JavaScript snippets for each analytical tool without having to buy into the Google Tag Manager. You'll still reap the benefits of one container to rule them all.
From my experience, the main benefits that Tag Management solutions bring are awareness of the tagging process so you can more easily make it an important piece of your development process, and it can also bring efficiencies to that process. So, if you are having many issues to push changes in your code and if you want to expedite your tagging process, maybe tag management is what have been waiting for.
If you are seriously considering Google Tag Manager(GTM) or any other tag management solution for that matter, I would advice to learn a bit more of what it really implies and what can it really deliver for you (with our post announcing the launch of GTM we put together a list of tag management resources and links you may find useful in your research).
GTM can be a great solution for many situations (I put together a piece comparing Google Tag Manager to Ensighten) and it can fall short in many other. However where the dividing line falls is not as evident as you may think.
Now with the Data Layer how can we handle that? Should we include in the data layer variables such as SKU1, ProductName1,.., SKU2, ProductName2,.. etc.? But then what Custom HTML tag would you use inside the Container for the following method:
How many addItem methods should we use, as you don't know how many Items will be purchased for every transaction, since this changes every time?
Am I missing something obvious here? Hope I've been clear enough explaining my doubt and I would really appreciate your help. Thanks a lot.
Voted Best SEO Tool 2010! Looking for SEO consulting?SEOmoz doesn't provide consulting, but our friends at Distilled still do. Rock on! Copyright © 1996-2012 SEOmoz. All Rights Reserved.
On October 1st, Google announced Google Tag Manager, a free tool for managing marketing and tracking tags on your site. I've sensed a lot of confusion around its launch, so I'd like to discuss what tag management is and why it's so powerful.
There are a number of companies that have been providing tag management software as a paid service for years (I'm sure they're wild about Google making it free). I won't discuss the pros and cons of different tag management software offerings, rather, just the concept in general, and some directly actionable tips using Google's service. At the end of the post, I'll include links to some of the other, likely more robust, tag management services.
Tags are snippets of code that usually placed in the of a page which enable 3rd-party tracking, analysis, and reporting. Google Analytics and other analytics platforms are an obvious tag, but remarketing, conversion tracking, affiliates, and advanced customer insight services utilize tags as well.
Tag management is a concept that was born out of the increasing need for more agile marketing measurement and tracking ability. Managing and making changes to tags can be tedious and involve unnecessary red tape.
I hate talking conceptually with this sort of thing, so let's get right to a real-world example. Let's get all up in SEOmoz's business.
Let's take the homepage of SEOmoz. Within the source of the homepage, I can identify a number of tags that would work well with a tag manager. Feel free to take a look for yourself, but it seems like the team at Moz has included:
Optimizely - For CRO testing *Google Tag Manager does not support A/B testing tags at launch, but it's apparently coming soon. For other tag managers, YMMV.
I'm assuming they've got even more tags on conversion pages such as the AdWords conversion snippet and any affiliate marketing tracking pixels.
Emails get sent, changes are added to a massive work queue, meetings are scheduled, sprints are added to, excuses are made, staging servers are updated 3 weeks later with live roll-out scheduled for another 3 weeks, etc.
Tag managers allow marketing to have control over their own little space on a web page. The 6 or 7 tags on any given page are replaced by a single container. That container contains code that listens to rules dictated in the tag manager's backend as to when to fire what tags.
If the Moz team wants to try out a new remarketing service, they can grab the snippet necessary, drop it into the tag manager, set some rules for when it gets fired, and publish live to the site - all in 10 minutes, all without ever getting IT involved.
Keep in mind that there are plenty of sites on the web, especially eCommerce, that are far more complicated than SEOmoz.org by nature. The need for Tag Management is even greater in this situation.
In order to reap the rewards of agility and future simplicity, there are quite a few hurdles and complexities that have to be overcome upfront. For this reason, tag management is simply not worth the effort for everyone. If you...
In case you haven't yet seen Google's 4 minute video explaining the utility and setup of GTM, give this video a look. Afterwards, we'll look at specific customizations that web marketers can make.
GTM offers some nice versioning and debugging features. Additionally, the container blog is an asynchronous JavaScript snippet so it will not effect page load or block other JavaScript.
GTM uses macros and rules to decide when a tag is fired. Macros are just a name-value pair that can be used to build rules around. The value itself, in many cases, is populated in runtime. That is, at the moment the page itself is being built for the user.
Your conversion pages likely have smorgasbord of conversion tracking tags like AdWords, eCommerce analytics snippets, ROI trackers from comparison shopping engines, etc.
A bit more complicated, especially if you're used to Google Analytics events. There are similarities, and you'll likely use them together, but it's best to forget that GA has something called an 'event' for now.
Events can be used to track interactions on a page after the page loads. As an example, if a user interacts with a form on your site, you can push an event. If there are any rules that depend on that event value, the specified tag will fire.
onsubmit="dataLayer.push({'event': 'form_submitted'});">Now, any tags that have a rule setup to fire when the event value's name is 'form_submitted' will do so.
What if we already have a standard Google Analytics onSubmit event set up so that we can track form submissions as a goal? What's the benefit here?
We have to step back and think a bit high level here to understand. A form being submitted on our site is an important occurrence. No matter what services we're using to track our marketing efforts 10 years from now, it's a piece of information we want to track. By using a tag manager and setting this form submission as an event, we remain super flexible in the following scenarios:
Start working with a new affiliate that pays out on form submissions but wants their own pixel to fire? We already have the event setup, just need to setup a rule in the tag manager.
One of your services make an "improvement" to their snippet that requires updating? Piece of cake. We can get it published and live on the site in 5 minutes with a tag manager.
If you want to set a standard company name across your site, for example, you could define it as a Constant String type macro. This would allow you to easily update the string in Google Tag Manager and see it reflected across all the tags that use this macro.
Got a global JavaScript variable that prints out on the page that you'd like to build a rule around? That's what this one is for. To give you a real example:
On my Tumblr, I noticed that, by default, Tumblr prints the tags (as in blog post tags, not marketing tags) in a global variable on the page.
Take this post for example. In the , we see the tags are passed into tumblr_meta_keyboards (Lord only know why the hell they chose to call this variable 'keyboards'. Typo?):
Creating a macro for this allows me to set custom rules for tag firing based on the data in the macro. Pretty easy to write up a rule that fires a custom version of the GA snippet that passes the tags into custom variables when tags are detected. Notice I reference the macro we just created above using the {{macro_name}} syntax in the custom variable line.
To explain a data layer in full opens up a whole can of worms. If you want the full story, Justin Cutroni described it in glorious detail in this post
A data layer is a collection of data on a page that includes any important piece of information from that page in an easy to access format. Imagine the confirmation page on an eCommerce site: you've got transaction details, shipping details, quantities, product IDs, order numbers, etc. It's all scattered about on the page. A data layer stores all that info in a name-value pair in the source code (not printed on the page so the user can see), making it super simple to access by a tag manager.
With tag management and a data layer working together, it's super simple to create a rule that sends your custom variables and segments to however many analytics platforms you use. Tracking logged in user behavior in GA, Mixpanel, and KissMetrics? Create a rule in GTM that pushes all three custom tags if the data layer name 'logged_in' = yes. Piece of cake.
It can be a hefty undertaking to implement a data layer, but the investment upfront can save tons of time in the long run. Most importantly, it allows IT to focus on fixing bugs and improving product, while the marketers don't have to worry about the IT time necessary to implement new tags ever again.
If you happen to have data that you'd like to access and store with macros marked up just right, you might be able to use them in your rules.
If you're lucky enough to have some useful data marked up just so, you might be able to make this work with some rules. This would be nice:
The basic installation of Google Analytics through GTM is really straightforward. By default, you'll utilize an "All Pages" rule that Google provides for default. Simple enough.
If you plan to do funky stuff like send custom variables according to rules you've set, you'll need to use the 'Custom HTML' tag type, and make sure you set a rule to block the traditional snippet from firing:
Apparently, there are further Google Analytics specific enhancements coming later to GTM, so the above methodology may be a lot of work for something that might be a cinch whenever Google gets around to releasing those enhancements.
Tag management is an agile marketers dream. Like Google Analytics did back in 2006, GTM has entered a paid market with a free offering that is a solid product from launch. If GTM follows the GA model, it will continue to improve. There are already a few features slated for future release, like the ability to manage A/B testing snippets. I also have a strong feeling that Google Analytics will be embracing GTM for their upcoming changes to cross-domain tracking, which is currently a very cumbersome process.
If you're interested in tag management but GTM doesn't get the job done, the following is a (hopefully) exhaustive list (credit, again to Justin Cutroni) of the other players in the tag management space. Though I don't have a terrible amount of experience with any, they've been at it for a while and are likely even more powerful than GTM:
About Mike Pantoliano — I write on the SEOmoz and Distilled blogs. I like to focus on web analytics, eCommerce, technical SEO, and site architecture. Follow me on Twitter!
44 Thumbs Up, 0 Thumbs Down Get your social onTweet VisitsN/APageviewsN/AAvg. Time on PageN/ADirect TrafficN/ASearch TrafficN/AReferral TrafficN/AWoot! Pulling some fresh data for you!
So you'd still have to go through them since they are the gatekeepers who control the websites (however much marketing like to think they do!). It's just shifting the problem, not solving it.
However the Byzantine rules big businesses employ with regards to websites aren't Google's fault and it looks like a good tool, and this was a helpful article. I'll just go back to begging developers to make changes now....
I've actually seen, and demonstrated, this in the past on some of the other tag management systems which were out there (and free, I didn't trial the paid solutions at the time as my employer then was using a free version which I noticed have a huge security issue whereby i was able to freely edit anyone's tags and thus demonstrated how this could be used to rewrite the entire website.
One thing that bothers me though, is that they did not include a way to confirm ownership of a site, in Google Webmaster Tools - using the Tag Manager. Since the scipts you put into your tag manager are not triggered before a user is actually on a page, you can not use your GA script to do this. I think this is valuable information, would be cool if you added it to the article!
Also, you really could combine the JavaScript snippets for each analytical tool without having to buy into the Google Tag Manager. You'll still reap the benefits of one container to rule them all.
From my experience, the main benefits that Tag Management solutions bring are awareness of the tagging process so you can more easily make it an important piece of your development process, and it can also bring efficiencies to that process. So, if you are having many issues to push changes in your code and if you want to expedite your tagging process, maybe tag management is what have been waiting for.
If you are seriously considering Google Tag Manager(GTM) or any other tag management solution for that matter, I would advice to learn a bit more of what it really implies and what can it really deliver for you (with our post announcing the launch of GTM we put together a list of tag management resources and links you may find useful in your research).
GTM can be a great solution for many situations (I put together a piece comparing Google Tag Manager to Ensighten) and it can fall short in many other. However where the dividing line falls is not as evident as you may think.
Now with the Data Layer how can we handle that? Should we include in the data layer variables such as SKU1, ProductName1,.., SKU2, ProductName2,.. etc.? But then what Custom HTML tag would you use inside the Container for the following method:
How many addItem methods should we use, as you don't know how many Items will be purchased for every transaction, since this changes every time?
Am I missing something obvious here? Hope I've been clear enough explaining my doubt and I would really appreciate your help. Thanks a lot.
Voted Best SEO Tool 2010! Looking for SEO consulting?SEOmoz doesn't provide consulting, but our friends at Distilled still do. Rock on! Copyright © 1996-2012 SEOmoz. All Rights Reserved.
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