Without data, your marketing work is just guesswork. Sometimes you get lucky, and your guesses prove to be profitable, but why risk it?
Data doesn’t “just happen”. It needs to be collected. Tags are the most common technology for collecting data for marketing purposes.
Typically, tags are deployed on the web page that is rendered in the user’s browser. When activated, they collect information about the user, their visits, and their interactions.
This information is then dispatched to marketing technology vendors, who can use the data to better understand how their products are working and to generate reports for you.
As a technical marketer, you need to understand what tags are, how they are deployed, what data they can collect, and how this data is dispatched to vendors.
Consider this…
You work at an online retail store, and you’ve planned and designed a huge sales campaign to boost the brand and to generate sales.
You’ve chosen a number of popular channels for promoting your campaign:
- Google Ads to appear in promoted search results for your most popular products,
- Facebook Ads to target your most likely customers where they are, and
- TikTok promotions where your influencer partners generate viral video content from select products.
You’ve assigned a pretty big budget for all this ad spend, and now you want to make sure that your investment has a solid return value.
Google, Facebook, and TikTok know exactly what happens on their platforms. They collect data about impressions (how many times your ads were viewed) and clicks (how many times your ads were clicked). This is great! You’ll get interesting data about things like placements and audience penetration.
But what about results?
It’s awesome that your ads are viewed and even clicked, but do they actually generate revenue?
Does your ad spend have a measurable return value?
Do people who land from your Facebook ads behave differently than those who land from Google search ads?
What about those who abandon their shopping carts – could you show them different ads later to incentivize them to come back and complete the purchase?
Tags collect data about your visitors
To inform Google, Facebook, and TikTok about what customers do on your site, you need to deploy tags.
Tags are typically script snippets or image elements that are purposefully designed to collect information about your visitors and their interactions on your digital properties. This information is then packaged and dispatched to the vendors.
To deploy these tags, your best option these days is to use a tag management system (TMS). A TMS is a service that makes it easy to consolidate tag deployment using an intuitive user interface. This is a much simpler approach than deploying each tag as a separate piece of code.
Your job is to decide which interactions are the most significant ones in order to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and to improve your understanding of visitor behavior.
Once you know what you want to measure, you can deploy the tags in the TMS, using trigger rules and dynamic values to ensure that the right data is collected at the right time to the right vendor.