When people talk about tags, they’re usually referring to snippets of java-script provided by third party services like Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdRoll, Adobe SiteCatalyst, etc. Every third party tool you bring to your site in order to improve your ability to reach & serve your customers would mean adding a new piece of java-script i.e. a tag to your site.
Once you’ve gotten everything put into place, every change or troubleshooting session could cost you hours, days, or even weeks of data. Managing tags in this way quickly becomes an tedious task. To simplify the tag management, one must make use of Tag managers. They not only ease your job but provides high reliability by allowing web makers and marketers to deploy tags all at single place.
What is a Tag Manager?
Tag managers are tools designed to minimize the code deployed on websites as well as in apps. They also facilitate the management of many pieces of code from a single platform without having to edit the site or the app.
A tag manager has two primary components to itself, the management platform and the code deployed in your website or app. This code is a single piece of java script which is inserted into your site or app,usually near the top, so it can be loaded and executed early.
Tag management platforms typically have menu-driven interfaces, allowing you to create tags, where you choose from a set of common tracking and application tags and insert your criteria for data capture.
Top reasons to shift to Tag Management System
In short, if your site slowed down because you overloaded it with too many tracking codes, you will be losing valuable time for first impressions, and your rankings may suffer too. A slow site could literally lose you millions.
It not only can impact your visitors, but also your ability to show up in search results which are more likely to provide you with the consumer traffic, your content and services deserve to witness. The more calls to third parties from your website, the more likely are the odds of your website slowing down.
All it takes for tag managers to drastically reduce the number of requests to single source is one snippet of javascript code. These lines of code do not conform to a loading order thus prevents code from taking up separate loading time. While many individual tags may load asynchronously, they will have to be individually read and executed. This execution often involves requesting information from the page which could still be loading.
Tag managers resolve this by reducing the number of code calls the visitor’s browser has to make, from an unimaginable number to just one. All calculations on how and when to fire tags can then occur simultaneously while the rest of the page loads without any interruptions.
It is also common for a tag manager to use Content Delivery Network or a CDN, which implies that you don’t need to rely on only one server to respond to get tags to work correctly. Instead of relying on a particular server, the CDN will identify the most optimal server to pull your tags from, and the fastest server(s) will be the one to load your tags.
Another way to increase speed is to consolidate data shared by multiple tags into a data layer which feeds all of the tags.Tag managers leverage this “data layer” to set a single point of reference that all the deployed tags can pull the necessary data from.
Deploying tags one at a time requires edits to your site every time a tag is deployed. Marketers or solo entrepreneurs who manage sites on their own may end up getting caught in a web of technical complexities of tag deployment.
At their simplest, tag managers require you to deploy a single line of code onto your sites. One line of code involves going through the development cycle just once. After this, anyone familiar with a menu-driven interface can deploy new tags at any time. Additional features of tag managers such as rules and macros can be used to fine tune tag behavior by setting conditions for tag use or data elements without have to write new code.
Wanting your site to load faster is great, but what if one or more of your tags experienced an error, causing key features of your site to fail completely ? Slow downs and page load failures due to javascript errors not only turn away customers in large numbers, at its worst, but they might encourage them to turn to a competitor because you’ve lost your window of opportunity to make a good first impression, to a technical snag. What’s worse is that you may lose them and their potential referral business permanently. Tag managers fix this by providing you with a single interface, allowing you to activate and deactivate tags, and set rules to control and manage when and how your tags fire.
Once you’ve deleted the broken tag, use ‘Create Version’ to save a copy of your current tag configuration, then click ‘Publish’ to make the changes live. Your site immediately stops using the broken tag henceforth. This method of emergency management in Google Tag Manager relies on key feature: versions. You can create a version of your sets of tags and switch between them.
Choose a previously saved version of your tag setup which does not contain the broken tag and roll back by clicking ‘Publish’ on that version. This also allows you to delete and create tags as and when needed, with the ability to publish different versions with minimal effort.
This takes a potential crisis that could cost you a fortune, and turns it into something that can be solved in minutes.
All you have to do now is to log in, deactivate the malfunctioning tag, and save the changes. The unwanted tag will get deactivated, your site will resume regular loading, and you shall be free to focus on following up with how you could to make up for lost data or functionality.
