Guest comment: Tags matter

All the research we’ve been engaged in the past twelve months has sought to make a simple point – that tags really do matter and are integral to online marketing success (& failure). 

Our latest Latency Test study shows that tags affect your ability to do basic things like get your pages to load quickly and track the number of visits your site gets effectively. 

Meanwhile, the deduplication research we published earlier this year shows that the proliferation of different tags (ad servers, PPC, site analytics, affiliate networks) on client’s pages has made it impossible for agencies to tell which of them delivered the final click, and thus to which (if they pay on last click) they should pay commission. The problem we reckoned costs advertisers about £35m a year just on affiliate CPA duplication. 

These things have proven reasonably easy to measure. But, the most basic ‘cost’ of tagging’ – the total pain of adding, editing and removing tags on a web page – is more tricky. There can be no doubt that agencies in particular face genuine costs as a result of this ongoing nightmare. First, in terms of the man hours it takes to create and implement new tags.  

Second, in terms of the delays to campaigns that occur in this process (when some site development cycles mean you have to wait three months to make a change, for example).

And third, who’s counting the cost of the errors that are made in tracking campaigns because a tag has been added incorrectly? We’re hoping to announce soon a partnership with a major digital media agency to estimate all these things. 

Last, there is the real strategic importance of tags. Marketing is truly becoming a data-driven business. To have any chance of holding sway in that future, organisations must become the owners and controllers of their own data. Given that this data is delivered through tracking tags, that means regaining control of them. 

Tags - tiny things that they are - really do matter. 

By Phil Buxton

Marketing Manager

TagMan

www.tagman.com

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