Are your tags in order?

How did that cookie get here? It’s time for marketers and agencies to pay attention to tags. James Sandoval, founder of Invizua, and Marc Kiven, founder and chief revenue officer at BrightTag explain…

If ensuring compliance with the EU e-Privacy directive is at the top of your to-do list right now then you’re probably paying a lot more attention to tags. Or you certainly should be.

Tags are the little known, but critically important, pieces of code used for data collection on websites.

These pieces of code enable the delivery of a pixel or an image within the webpage or they can be JavaScript code that allows for more advanced data collection. And each tag acts as the trigger for reading or writing a cookie.

The problem is that tags are proliferating to the extent that a typical e-commerce business could have anywhere from 50-150 third party tags written in numerous pages across its site at any given time.

Failure to manage tags properly, and the vendors supplying those tags, creates business risk in four areas:

• Data Control and Ownership: When a site owner puts third-party code on their site, control over the data collection process is ceded to one or more third-party vendor partners. The more tags, the more third parties have control over a business’s data, and the cookie placement process as well.

• Operational Efficiency: The traditional process of managing multiple third-party vendors and their tags requires site owners to place custom code on specific pages of their sites. For many large sites, this typically requires the IT team to make the changes as part of a scheduled deployment process, which can delay campaigns and lead to lost revenue opportunities. This process is archaic and extraordinarily inefficient.

• Consumer Privacy Compliance: Allowing the individual application of vendor partners’ tags across a website creates a substantial risk in the context of the E-Privacy Directive. Centralising the management of vendors’ tags and their data distribution empowers business to allow customers to easily opt in or opt out of all data collection.

• Content/Page Delivery Performance: Every new tag added to a site can introduce additional page delivery latency and negatively affect the customer experience. It is the end user visiting the website who bears the brunt of this overhead when they load pages containing hundreds of lines of third-party code. Research shows that slow websites create sub-optimal experiences for customers, hitting the bottom line.

Taking control of vendors’ tags and controlling who is collecting data from your website is vital not just for compliance with the EU e-Privacy Directive but also for the future of your business.

By being fully in control of data collection, you are better equipped to manage the expectations of the consumers who use your site and honor their privacy choices. You also can ensure that the valuable insights gathered from site activity are being leveraged to the fullest extent whether the data is fed into your analytics system or it is being used to drive additional value in your marketing efforts.

Until now, tags have been little-reported tools in the management and monetisation of business data. It’s time to understand how they work, how they could work better and how to protect companies from the risks of poor vendor and tag management and data control.