Friday, March 13, 2020

Management of Third Party Tags, Best Practices


This article is about
Use of tags on your site and implications on cookies and performance
On most of the websites you visit today, third-party software is collecting data and loading content. And they are doing it both before your eyes and behind the scenes. This is done through third-party tags, i.e. fragments of codes that can collect important information used for marketing analyzes (for example Google Analytics, Adobe) or to provide forms to customers who intend to review products, as happens in most e -commerce.
In this article:
  1. Tag management and governance
  2. Time management
  3. Priorities
  4. Website performance
  5. Revenue and conversions
  6. Best practices
  7. The Ebiquity + Blue Triangle advantage
  8. The best third party tag management

Unfortunately, however, the tags weigh down the page and are difficult to manage. They can lead to long loading times, worsening user experience, productivity in the workplace and overall company revenue.

This post is intended to recommend best practices on tag management and governance, developed over years of work experience with corporate clients from the most varied sectors.

Ebiquity and Blue Triangle worked closely on various web performance projects. Recently, the two companies have helped Marriott (Marriott International is an American multinational that manages and grants numerous franchise accommodations) to carry out a large-scale tag management project, which has generated extraordinary results in terms of performance, UX, productivity and hotel reservations. Here are the focal points discussed during the joint webinar organized by the two companies.

Tag management and governance

Let's list and discuss together the issues the two organizations have recently faced with regards to tag management and governance:

Time management

Those who find themselves having to manage tags and performance monitoring tools work to make IT organizations leaner. However, due to the problems listed above, it remains necessary to devote time and energy to managing third-party tags. It is possible to seize good opportunities following every single action taken.
Understanding what not to do is as important as understanding what to do.
We often find that companies are unable to manage their time effectively. However, strategic planning is a fundamental building block of tag management.

Priority

Development teams are expected to improve their business day after day, but too often organizations invest most of their resources in areas that will not pay back what they invested. And all this at the expense of what matters most.
Without the support of "Data Driven Insights" (which is the mantra of Ebiquity!), The risk of incorrectly indicating priorities to your work team is very high.

Website performance

A slow page speed translates into a bad browsing experience and, to a lesser extent, a drop in revenue and conversions. As the number of added tags increases, the site becomes more complex and difficult to manage. And a site full of tags can become a very slippery surface to walk on if handled incorrectly.

Read Also: SEO NYC Company
In addition to effective tag management (which we'll discuss later), you should establish rules that tell your third-party vendors how to behave, requiring them to stick to their tag performance agreements.
Note that tag performance issues may arise at any time that you and your vendors will not be able to control. For example, the long outage of AWS on February 28 last year has had major repercussions on several third-party technologies.

Revenues and conversions

Blue Triangle analyzed the performance of the top 500 e-commerce sites in the United States between Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday and found that on average third-party tags slowed page loading speed by 22% (compared to previous month). This contributed to a general slowdown of 5%. At first glance, this latter figure may not seem much, but it is easy to understand that a delay of this kind is able to make companies lose millions of sales.
Blue Triangle and Ebiquity have partnered with Marriott to help the company with a governance and tag management project applied to the Home Page. The result was an 8% improvement in performance, which translated into a significant increase in online bookings.

Best practices

Nowadays, companies need a large amount of data and information, since most of it depends on it. To exploit this data in the best possible way, companies must prepare a plan that allows them to get the maximum return from an initial investment based on third-party software.

How to best manage and govern these tags to increase revenue

The only way to achieve long-term success is to build governance that fits perfectly with business processes. To do this you will first need to ask the right questions, then offer the correct directions to your development team.

Think of one of the many tags you have on your website and answer the following questions:
Who is responsible for this technology?
Who should do insights that guide business decisions about that technology?
What are the planned actions that team members need to complete using this information?
Who should set priorities that are part of a wider vision of the organization?
Answering these questions should solve most of the organizational problems discussed above. Now you will need to focus on User Experience issues and those involving the various levels of a company.

Monitoring and performance of each of the third-party tags based on actual user experiences is the first step towards improving business processes.

From here, you will have to examine each of your tags and answer this question: does the commercial advantage offered by this tag outweigh the impact on sales of the performance?
Using Blue Triangle's revenue calculator, we can quickly answer this question: in the case of one of the customers I recently helped overcome the impasse his site was in, the Youtube.com tag blocked other items while loading page, increasing the overall load time by 1.4 seconds.
Is the Youtube.com tag alone able to increase the business by 37 thousand dollars during every single week? It's hard to believe it, but it's true!

The Ebiquity + Blue Triangle advantage

Ebiquity and Blue Triangle are trying to merge their skills, creating a revolutionary technology with a consultative approach capable of increasing the long-term gain of each portal. The shared service will provide users with over twenty years of experience in the Ebiquity sector, its ability to optimize performance, the functions of the MarTech and AdTech platforms and the analytical features of the Blue Triangle technology.

What does this mean in practice?

What has been said means that not only will you receive a performance management and monitoring platform that uses and monitors real user data to find more revenue opportunities, but you will also understand how your business organization should remodel itself to obtain even more important revenues. Tags can significantly alter the earnings of a company active on the web, therefore it will be worth optimizing the site (and with it the management of the tags) to maximize revenues.





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