Tealium today announced that it has joined the Web Analytics Association (WAA) as a corporate member for enterprise tag management. The announcement coincides with Tealium’s appearance at the WAA LA Symposium tomorrow, Jan. 18, in Santa Monica, Ca. Said WAA President Peter Sanborn: “Tag management is rapidly becoming an established best practice in our industry. On behalf of the WAA Board and members, we welcome Tealium to the association.”
For more information, read the full release.
One of the many methods through which Tealium improves site performance is by using asynchronous loading of tags. This method is becoming increasing popular, especially after Google’s adoption of asynchronous tags in 2010 for its analytics product. Tealium is one of the pioneers in asynchronous tracking, first adopting the methodology for tag management back in 2008.
But what exactly is asynchronous tracking and how does it improve site performance?
Before explaining the asynchronous method, it is important to note how tags load and why they slow down web sites. Most tags today are loaded in synchronous manner (think serial). When a page loads a synchronous tag, it waits for the tag content to load before moving on to the next content. The figure below shows an example of a page loading 4 tags in a synchronous or serial manner. The page starts by loading the first tag. After the tag has been completely loaded, the page moves on the second tag. The process is then repeated for the ensuing tags. Assuming each tag takes half a second to load, we’re looking at a total load time of 2 seconds to load all 4 tags.
Synchronous Tag Loading
With asynchronous tracking, the browser can load the different tags in parallel. It no longer has to wait for a certain tag to load completely before moving on to the next or the rest of the page content. This is shown in the figure below. Using our example of the page with 4 tags, we can see that the browser starts downloading the 4 tags in parallel, completing the process much faster. The 4 tags in this case are completed in a fraction of a time compared to the synchronous method.
Asynchronous Tag Loading
Asynchronous tracking has many benefits. One obvious benefit is improved site performance, as demonstrated above. Another benefit is improved tracking and data accuracy. Because tags are loading in parallel to the rest of the content, they can be placed on top of the page, which improves the accuracy of data being collected.
Next Step:
Learn more about Tag Management
Request a demo of Tag Management Console
I’m a fan of data. And my favorite kind of data is clean and well-organized. And you’re going to need well-organized data before you begin your next project. It’s kind of like cleaning up your desk or tidying up your house. It’s just what needs to be done before the next project can begin. And your next project is the website re-design.
Assume your website will be around for a long time. Consider doing it right once and for all by building something that will last. Here are my top three reasons to unify (or clean up) your data before your next site redesign.
1) One Version of the Truth
I remember hearing this “single version of the truth” phrase often in my relational database days. Is this something you hear around your office? The same thing you strive for with data stored internally should also apply to your tag vendors outside of your internal firewall. You will have data that is shared across vendors. (i.e. Both your Chat provider and your Analytics tools want to track what was purchased on the order confirmation page.) If everyone gets the data from the same place then your data values will be uniform. In fact, a universal data tag is really your only option for uniform data.
A sample data object showing data that will be shared:
var my_page_data = {
product_name : 'blue widget XXL',
product_id : 'item12345',
product_quantity : '3'
}
2) Easy on the Eyes
Lots of poorly-named JavaScript variables can cause a headache. And website tag vendors don’t make this easy. No analytics vender will use “site_section”. They might have you set “s.prop3″ to site section or set variable “CF12″ to site section. But an implementor or contractor looking at the code is not likely to know that the value in s.prop3 is site section. Which means they’ll need a secondary look-up spreadsheet. And they’ll probably not have the latest version of this spreadsheet. Which means they’ll probably implement the new tag vendor incorrectly. This reminds me of a children’s book If You Take a Mouse to the Movies.
var my_page_data = {
site_section : 'energy efficient products',
site_sub_section : 'blue widgets'
}
3) Stand the Test of Time
I probably should have listed this as #1. Most enterprises rebuild their website at least once a year. If your site is changing then you’re likely to break things. That is why you budget extra hours for QA. Save the time and money by unifying your data now. You’ll be glad you did before for next year’s redesign. If you change your HTML and the product can no longer be “scraped from the DOM” from a <span> item where “id=productField” then your custom code breaks. Instead, make the decision now to prepare for your next site redesign and keep the data in a container that will not depend on your last HTML layout template.
I’ll stop with just these three reasons, but there might be a list of 10 reasons. I’m pretty sure I could make the Yahoo home page with the article, “Top 10 Reasons to Unify Your Data Before Your Next Site Redesign.” 
And with that said, Mike – tag you’re it.
Before starting this post, I want to point that this blog is for debate purposes only and Tealium does not use any ETags or Zombie Cookies.
There’s been a lot of news lately about the use of various techniques such as “local shared objects” or “HTML5 cookies” in order to re-spawn deleted cookie and bypass the consumer’s choice to opt out. These are sometimes referred to as zombie cookies. We at Tealium do not condone such practices and believe that consumers should have the choice to opt out if they want to. However, this post is not about the philosophical debate and there’s been a tremendous amount of discussions already on the topic. An example can be found here.
The topic that we feel has not been discussed is how these same re-spawning techniques can be used to actually improve consumer privacy. That’s right. Zombie cookies can actually be good for privacy.
Before I continue, I want to point out that there are two kinds of opt-outs today. The first is using the new “do not track” headers within new browsers. This is something that many vendors already support. Customers of Tealium for example can take advantage of Tealium’s support in this area to improve the privacy of their visitors.
The second method – which is more traditional – is to allow consumers to opt out of specific tracking. For example, a consumer may decide to be tracked through analytics tools but opt out of behavioral targeting.
The problem with today’s opt-out mechanism is that they’re inherently flawed. Here’s why:
When a visitor opts out of a service, an “opt out” cookie is added to the visitor’s browser. The vendors’ scripts or tags look for the “opt out” cookie. If no cookie exists, then the tracking is continued. If an “opt out” cookie exists, the service stops the tracking. Because these services rely on cookies for opt out, when a visitor deletes their cookies, the visitor has effectively just opted back in.
The problem with today’s opt-out mechanism is that it is only temporary and stops functioning the moment visitors delete their cookies. The industry needs a more permanent way to allow people to opt out. As discussed previously, the browsers have come up with their solution in the form of “do not track” headers. The problem with these headers is that they’re an “all or nothing” proposition and do not provide visitors with the ability to opt out of only a category of trackers.
What if the industry started adopting some of the same zombie cookie techniques in order to provide a more permanent opt out mechanism? The same technology that is used in some instances to re-spawn tracking cookies can be used to re-spawn “opt out” cookies.
Remember, it’s not the technology but the application that matters. By using the same techniques, digital trackers can actually provide a more permanent opt out mechanism to consumers and better respect their request.
As of the writing of this post, we know of no tracker using such techniques for opt outs and we’re not recommending that vendors do so. But what do you think? Do you think that this technology should be used to provide a better privacy or do you think the industry should completely stay away from such re-spawning techniques?
My personal belief is that if a technology can be used to provide a valuable service to consumers, then it should be used.
And with that said, Ty – tag you’re it.
One of the conversations that digital marketing teams engage in today’s environment is whether they need a tag management system or not. As companies are increasing their use of digital marketing technologies, their need for a tag management solution increases. Up to now, most companies seeking a tag management system typically shared one of two characteristics:
There are of course other factors that can prompt organizations to invest in tag management systems. For a thorough list, we recommend that you check out the Forrester research titled “How Tag Management Improves Web Intelligence” by Joe Stanhope.
Up to now the group least likely to require a tag management system included the two following characteristics:
Sounds logical right? Think again.
Just recently, Google introduced a new feature in Google Analytics which provides valuable reports around page load performance, called Site Speed Reports. The new feature helps companies determine the impact of site performance on their web site conversion.
In order to take advantage of this features, customers will have to update their tracking code in the following manner:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
(function() { var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true; ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script>
The change of tracking code is not unique to Google Analytics. Just recently, Yahoo! announced that the Yahoo! Web Analytics tracking code V4 will no longer be supported.
In both cases, tag management systems let customers update their tracking code without changing their pages. For Tealium customers, this is just a matter of changing their templates from within the Tag Management Console.
We’re no longer seeing tag management as a technology deployed by customers that want to constantly add or change their vendors, but also by organizations that want to make sure that they’re deploying the latest version of their vendor tags. To find out more about how Tealium can help you leverage the latest features from your digital marketing vendors, contact us.
We are happy to announce the general availability of the SiteCatalyst Toolbox for users of Tealium Tag Management Console. So what does it do?
With Tealium, customers can simplify and streamline their page tagging by deploying just one tag on their site. Users can then log in to Tag Management Console and use the SiteCatalyst Toolbox to manage their complex SiteCatalyst implementations.
Some of the capabilities of this toolbox include:
The SiteCatalyst Toolbox is available effective immediately for all users of Tag Management Console.
Next Step:
Tag Management or Universal Tag?
If you attended X Change, one of the huddles offered was around universal tagging. There are a growing number of companies taking different approaches to the same problem: web site tagging is a mess – whether it’s for web analytics, ad, affiliate tags or a combination. The industry as a whole is starting to tackle the issue – something that we started addressing over two years ago – and that’s a good thing.
Some are using the term “universal tag” while others call it “tag management”. The term embraced by the industry in the long run is anybody’s guess. Our feeling is that it’s pretentious for any one person or organization at this point to decide what the term is. The industry is still very new. In the long run, the clients will decide what the best nomenclature is.
I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember all the different terms that people used to describe the “Web Analytics” industry:
Web Metrics, Site Statistics, Web Stats, Site Analysis, Web Traffic Analysis, Web Intelligence, eBusiness Intelligence, Online Metrics, eMetrics – and I’m sure I missed a few. Eventually the industry started standardizing around the term “Web Analytics”.
Remember ASP? No, not “average selling price” or “active server pages”. It was the term referred by almost all SAAS (Software as a service) providers in the 2000-2003 era. It stood for “Application Service Provider”. Now everyone’s using SAAS. The business models are the same. Only the names are different.
We’re now going through same nomenclature education/battle within the “universal tag” industry. You’ve probably heard the various terms: Universal Tag, Tag Management, Tag Management System, Container Tag, and two other terms that I’d personally like to throw into the mix: “Master Tag” and “Tagging As A Service” (TAAS) – you’ve heard them here first.
So what’s the point of all this?
The point is that it doesn’t matter. This is what marketing people do in order to educate the market. Unfortunately, most of the time they end up confusing the market more than educate it.
So what’s our position on this? Well it depends partly on the methodology used by the provider to tackle the issue. But there are some key features that companies should take into consideration when looking at a universal tag/tag management solution:
Our belief is that a true “universal” tag should provide customers with either option. Some customers prefer the entire solution to be hosted by the vendor – it’s easy, clean and void of headaches. Others (especially clients with large traffic) insist on hosting their own solution. For such clients, any third-party server point of failure is an important determining factor.
As of today, there are two ways to change tagging rules within a deployment. One choice is to use a dashboard or a user interface to make such changes. For Tealium, this is the Tag Management Console, which lets business users modify their tag deployment by adding/removing vendors, setting load conditions, data inputs (meta tags, breadcrumbs, javascript variables, etc.), variable mappings, commission rules, etc.
On the other hand, some customers, specifically those that are more technical in nature want to go beyond what can be made available in a user interface. They want to get under the hood and understand the solution at its core and not treat it as some black box magical tag manager. Our belief is that the solution should provide both options to the user.
With the lease model, the solution is a SAAS, or as I’d like to call it TAAS. Many of the tag management solutions fall into this category. However, many customers may prefer to own the license outright and not pay based on the number of server calls, especially since one of the value propositions of universal tags is to reduce any reliance on one vendor. Again, the solution needs to provide the necessary level of flexibility in this regard.
A one-line tag means a simple include line pointing to a JS file which then makes one or many calls to a server yielding the actual “tag” implementation either statically defined or via server configuration. A one-line tag provides the simplest deployment to the client, but comes at a cost. The server dependency can cause reduced customer experience and a single point of failure. The concept of a rich-tag is more of a “master tag” allowing the client development team to expose data relevant to the application. A rich tag has more initial upfront work but is ultimately more flexible and from a performance standpoint, optimal. We usually see clients that have over 5 data points (variables) opt for rich tags and others with less demanding needs opt for one-line includes. If your site already has meaningful meta data tags, microformats, or consistent elements in the page like breadcrumbs, you may already have a rich tagged site. Our belief is that a “universal tag” supports both tagging options.
For Tealium, a universal tag is about choice. Henry Ford once said “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”. Although the philosophy works for industrial assembly lines, a “one-size fits all” strategy is the wrong approach for enterprise-level web sites with distinct environments.
This is the Tealium philosophy – a solution that can adapt to client needs and environment. This is why we feel that “tag management” as it stands today only provides a subset functionality of an enterprise-level “universal tag”, and why we have chosen to build universal tag products and to provide universal tag services.
Tag Management has arrived. While attending this year’s Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP) Summit, one of the topics of discussion among attendees was universal tagging and tag management. This of course is great news as it validates our vision dating back to 2008, as we first introduced universal tagging for web analytics.
What was once a vision and a consulting project here at Tealium is now a topic of discussion at web analytics conferences, including the upcoming X Change. And as marketers’ knowledge of universal tagging increases, so does the product’s maturity. A key requirement has been the ability for business users to manage their tags without IT involvement.
Enter Tag Management Console.
The Tag Management Console is the admin console for Universal Tag Deployments. Within the Console, non-technical users can manage their tag using a drag-and-drop interface.
Want to add DoubleClick tags to your site? Simply drag the DoubleClick icon and enter your account ID.
Want to add Google Analytics? Drag the Google Analytics icon and enter your account ID.
Want to add Eloqua tags for better lead nurturing? Well, you get the idea.
Once configured, users can add, edit and delete their marketing tags and manage complex implementations such as changing mappings from one vendor variable to another. Again, all this is done without straining valuable IT resources, meaning that you can make changes to your tags in hours or days instead of weeks and months.
Best of all, the Tag Management Console is now available to all Tealium Universal Tag customers and Certified Partners.
Contact us to schedule a live demo of Tag Management Console.
In our previous posts, we talked about how the Universal Tag can simplify your web analytics implementation and improve the web analytics process. In this post, we’re going to discuss another key benefits associated with the Universal Tag:
Universal Tag is about preparing for the unknown.
Let’s face it. Implementations change because requirements change. Traditional web analytics deployments require you to know your requirements well in advance before you start tagging. Your reporting requirements (how you want to see the data) will dictate how you tag your analytics solution.
Want to see the impact of site search on cart activity? You’ll have to tag for it.
Want to see the number of times people view a product before placing it in cart? You’ll have to tag for it.
Want to see the effect of white paper downloads on lead conversions? You’ll have to tag for it.
This is costly. And what makes the process more cumbersome is the fact that requirements change. The change can be part of the evolutionary process associated with web analytics, or simply because of unexpected consequences of your implementation. In this post, we’re going to discuss what happened to a major consumer products company and how the Universal Tag saved them from re-tagging.
In this specific scenario, the company just launched a virtual world promoting many of their different brands. The virtual world is built completely in Flash and in order to track the effectiveness of the on-site promotional offers, the company decided to track the promotions as on-site campaign impressions. In other words, as a new offer (internal ad) appears on the screen, an impression tracking is sent to the web analytics tool.
This measurement framework allows the company to measure the click-through rate of the internal offers (since impressions are being tracked). However, it also results in an unexpected side effect.
Assuming that upon each offer, an impression request is sent to the analytics tool, what happens if the visitor leaves his/her computer while keeping the browser open (say heads out to lunch)?
This implementation will result in many extra unwanted calls being sent to the vendor, which results in both artificially high number of server calls (cost to the customer), as well as engagement metrics in the form of time spent on site.
With a traditional web analytics deployment, the client will have to go back to the web development team and to add a logic within the content management system that caps the number of ad impressions being sent. However, with a Universal Tag deployment, fixing this is simply a matter of adding a new plug-in to the Universal Tag library. The plug-in automatically cuts off requests after a defined number of impressions. The web development team or the agency does not have to change a thing and web analytics practitioners can be in total control of how the data is sent to the vendor.
Web analytics implementations are not always easy. Often times, as you’re getting into advanced implementations, there’s a chance that you’ll see unexpected behaviors or side effects from the implementation. With traditional deployments, these require a re-tagging exercise. The Universal Tag on the other hand lets you deploy once and fine tune without having to re-touch your page tags every time, hence preparing for the unknown.
In our last post, we talked about the use of Universal Tag to improve your web analytics implementation. In this post, we are going to discuss another major benefit associated with the Universal Tag.
Universal Tag is about having a better web analytics process.
Web analytics is an iterative process. A typical web analytics cycle is shown here. First, users deploy their web analytics tool. From there, they analyze the data, and make changes to their sites based on findings. The cycle then repeats itself. However, in some cases, the findings may require users to look at the data in a different angle. Often times, the new angle will require a change in web analytics implementation, which means re-tagging the site.
To demonstrate this, we’re going to discuss an analysis that we recently did for a technology company. This client sells expensive enterprise software and uses a large number of white papers in order to educate its user base. As part of the analysis, the client wanted to know if white papers have a positive impact on site conversions, which is lead generation. The client’s tool of choice is Google Analytics.
To do the analysis, we used the “Visits with Conversion” segment and looked at the downloaded files for the segment. This will show us which files were downloaded during the same session where the lead was captured. The results were initially shocking. For this particular segment, we saw about 30% less white paper downloads than an average session. Are we to believe that converting visitors are less interested in white papers than non-converting ones? This meant that we needed additional information.
The next hypothesis was that visitors download the papers, read them and then come back to the web site and submit their information. In order to prove this new hypothesis, we had to make an implementation change since Google Analytics does not provide this level of cross-session analysis without customization.
The solution was to use a visitor-scope custom variable to capture the downloaded document and look at the “download” custom variable report for the “converting” visitors.
With default web analytics deployments, this requires editing the tagging within the download pages, which is a laborious process that will involve the web development team. However, through the Universal Tag, this process be can implemented without a single page tag change.
Following this change, the discovery proved our hypothesis. In fact, we learned that it takes an average of 2 days between a white paper download and a lead registration. This exercise clearly showed the dangers of relying only on session-level data when dealing with complex sales.
Universal Tag made this discovery possible without re-tagging. Because organizations can fine-tune their implementation without costly re-tagging exercises, they can learn faster and therefore get more value from their web analytics investment than those using standard tags.
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