Tag You Are It: Tags, and Tag Management
As a child tag was
simple. Sure you have the occasional argument
as to whether the other person was really at Safe Base, actually touched you or
the definition of cheating. However,
this tag is more like that irritating material inside your shirt that bothers the
back of your neck. These tags are behind
the scenes on websites and most people don’t know they are there. If they are not installed correctly or there
are too many, they can make the site load irritatingly slow. In this blog post I will share what Tags are
and why many people expect Tag Management to continue to be a hot topic in
2013.
Tags are a little piece
of code written into the data layer of a website. There are a number of different types of tags
with their distinct purpose. A list of different types found at Wikipedia[i]
are as follows:
- Tag
(metadata), an index term assigned to a piece of information
- Tag URI, a
unique identifier protocol used in internet technologies
- Tag (programming), a method for passing
parameters to subroutines
- TAG (BBS),
a bulletin board software program
- HTML tag,
a component of the HTML programming language
- Knowledge
tag, a type of meta-information that captures knowledge about an
information resource
- Revision
tag, a label for a specific revision of a project
- Tag
system, a deterministic computational model
- Using a tag
editor to edit the metadata of multimedia content
- The entries in tag files
generated by ctags, indexes to identifiers in source code
Tags for web analytics help
track and collect data from website visitors.
In the simplest form Tags are used to track page views, visitors, time
on site, referrers and all the basic usual data. They work in the background and interact directly
with basic web analytic tools. In 2012
Tag’s became more robust with customization.
“By customizing your tag to collect intelligent metadata, you can
significantly enhance the types of advanced analysis you do with your web analytics
tool. For example, a newspaper publisher can use the custom variables feature
of the analytics tool to identify which section of the site visitors saw during
their visit. Or a bank can pass anonymous data about visits by existing
customers and visits by prospects. Or that
the visitor completed a survey during the visit. Or that they participated, unknowingly
of course in an A/B or MTV test.”[ii]
This
uber-intelligence empowers the company to improve segmentation because most
analytic tools do not collect all this information on their own. The year of 2012 became the year of the
tag. Companies started utilizing tags
more and customizing them extensively.
This caused a major problem with website load times and major management
issues. Not only did they slow down websites but installing, modifying,
updating and collection became a huge head ach for websites. It was too complicated for most companies IT
person and required a third party servicer.
Companies like Tagman, Satellite and Tealium specific to just Tag
Management began operating in the market.
Soon Google Analytics and some of the other big analytics companies took
note and started to introduce their own versions. Innovation became essential to improve the
technology for faster website loading and simplifying the management process.
2013 will larger more sophisticated system that will make tags even more powerful. The industry will see some
major consolidation of many of these tag management specific firms. Technology will make the process of managing
tags easier and quicker. Some interfaces
like Google will make it as easy as an HTML editor. The ability to increase the levels of
segmentation will improve and targeting the client will become easier. According to the podcast Beyond Web AnalyticsEpisode 63: "2012 in review & looking to 2013"[iii],
tag management will continue to dominate web analytics.
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