tag management

4 Things You Need to Know About Google Tag Manager

July 5, 2016 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that makes it easy for marketers and IT professionals to add and update website tracking codes – including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and social media – with just a few clicks and without the need to edit your website tracking code. Google Tag Manager provides businesses with control of the tracking codes, usability for marketers and IT, the ability to share information with specific users’ permission, and integrations to measurement marketing code like Facebook. Tag Manager captures the data that can lead to better ROI, a reduction in marketing costs, and a lot of time saved for your team!

Below are 4 things you need to know about Google Tag Manager:

1. You Need a Measurement Plan

A measurement plan is a document that translates your organization’s goals and objectives into metrics so that you can keep track of your website and marketing. A measurement plan provides a framework for the configuration and implementation of digital marketing strategies on your website. Without a measurement plan, there is no structure for a tagging implementation strategy. There is no way to verify that you have the necessary information to measure your goals and objectives!

2. One Tracking Code to Measure Marketing Initiatives

With Tag Manager, you get one tracking code to measure your website and marketing initiatives. This consolidates all of your data into one location to foster better decision-making based on that data. There are tagging templates and integrations to combine tracking codes from Facebook, LinkedIn, AdWords, Google Trust Stores, and more. Just one Google Tag Manager code will increase your website speed and improve your customer’s online experience on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.

3. Google Tag Manager works for Web & Mobile Apps

Your Google Tag Manager tracking code should be added to your existing website code. As mentioned in the previous section, this Google Tag Manager code will work on responsive websites (for desktops, tablets, and mobile phones). Specifically for mobile phones, the implementation of Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps is done with Firebase SDK. Firebase is a Google tool and infrastructure that is used to build better mobile apps and grows businesses by developers. Firebase SDK works for both Android and iOS to track behavior and actions that are specific to mobile apps and indicate success for businesses.

4. Better Measurement of ROI with Google Tag Manager

Too often, marketing and IT professionals work to get a website and mobile app live while neglecting to identify how they plan to measure success. With Google Tag Manager, both marketing and IT professionals have the ability to create and capture metrics that are needed to determine success as well as improve upon that success. The accessibility of integrations and templates make it easier to collect metrics within a single console. Overall, you get better data, better metrics, and better decision-making with Google Tag Manager. This means more money in your bucket and less time and money wasted!

Check out Google Tag Manager resources or contact DaBrian Marketing Group today!

Top 5 Financial Services Marketing Tips

February 13, 2013 by Daniel Laws 1 Comment

We do a lot of work with banks and credit unions because of previous relationship within these markets. The financial services marketing landscape has really changed over the past decade and it’s about to get a mobile face lift and whole lot more in 2013. Below are my top five recommendations for bank & credit union marketers:

Go Mobile

Invest in mobile banking and measure the effectiveness of mobile to generate leads as well as increase sales. According to a report by Adology, Mobile banking is having the biggest impact on routine banking activities: 64% of mobile banking users in the U.S. say that the future ability to use their smartphones or tablets to check account balances would be highly valued. This move has the potential to increase liability and risk for financial services institutions, so make sure it delivers value to your customers.

Incorporate Measurement

Measure all of your marketing campaigns and implement tag management solutions. With all of the marketing tactics that financial services use as well as third party application processing, tag management will help to simplify tagging and limit data collection challenges. Tag management boils down to this–one tag on your site for numerous solutions, such as affiliates, third party application, media buys, etc.

Test, Test, Test!

Test your marketing tactics, PLEASE! The cost of many tests can be justified and can help improve your institution’s online sales process. If you’re not testing, you might as well dump a portion of you marketing budget into the trash and set it on fire.

Tag Management for Financial Services Marketing

The best place to test is within the conversion process. Invest the time, money, and resources into conversion optimization. It will require you to bring your partners (third party vendors) to the table for discussions. Tag management solutions can also streamline required vulnerability testing within the application process.

Predictive Modeling for Applications & Quotes

Now that measuring all of your marketing tactics is on the agenda, you should consider attribution and predictive modeling. Attribution modeling will help you give credit to marketing tactics that most impact the conversion process, and predictive modeling will help you to forecast future sales and revenue.

Have your own financial services marketing tips to add? Let us hear them in the comments below!

Sizing Up Tag Management For Your Organization

December 5, 2012 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

What is Tag Management?

Tag management is a way to add, edit, and remove tags from your website. The most common forms of tags (small piece of code) are for web analytics, search engine marketing, ad serving, and testing; however, there are many other types. These tags are usually in the form of JavaScript. Tag management systems provide you with flexibility to combine these tags into a single tag and control the deployment of the tag from a console, not directly on the website.

Do I need Tag Management?

In my opinion, it depends on the type of website (content management systems or “hard coded” websites), your marketing tactics, website performance, security policy, and business strategies. If you are not proactively looking to measure all marketing initiatives, then you’re not ready for tag management and you need to start measuring. If you have more than 1 million pageviews to your website and 3 different types of JavaScript or tags on the website, then you might want to consider tag management. In addition, if you have specific needs such as poor load-times, industry security issues, or to make a strategic decision to empower your marketing team, I would recommend looking into a tag management system.

Types of Tags supported by Tag Management Solutions

How it works: Common Approaches of Tag Management

There is a variety of implementation methodologies, but most vendors use client-side tag implementation. A few use server-side tag management and a combination of client-side & server-side tag management. Both options use JavaScript tags; however, the main difference refers to where most tags are fired, either at the browser or server level.

Why Tag Management?

Most tag management solutions have partners with prebuilt common tags to implement quickly and save you time. There are often workflow and user administration features to manage users and processes to manage quality assurance as well as approvals to launch tags. The uses of simplified user interfaces make it easy for everyone to use the tool. There are also reports to see if the tags are working effectively. Many vendors give you additional features for auditing, conversion analysis, and attribution modeling.

Recommendations for Tag Management by Business type

For small businesses that need tag management, I would recommend Google Tag Manager. It’s free and it should provide you with the basic necessities of tag management with align with your marketing tactics.
For mid-sized businesses with multiple tags, 1-10 million pageviews, and a need for tag templates, I would recommend QuBit. It has native reporting with API features and about 50 tag templates for ease of use. It’s fairly priced and has options for self-service or hosted management.
For enterprise businesses with multiple tags, mobile devices, security issues and more, I would recommend Ensighten. It has hybrid deployment options with additional modules such as mobile or privacy. It’s more expensive but worth the security features. There’s a one-time flat implementation fee plus the cost of pageviews.

Action Items to move forward with Tag Management

Take inventory of your tags and future tagging opportunities.
Review tag management solutions that meet your business’s needs.
Do your research on possible vendors & demo the solutions.
Select a solution for your business.
Find two tag management champions: Business side & IT.

Streamline Your Tag Management Strategy

October 10, 2012 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

So your organization has made the decision to pursue digital analytics. You’ve managed to get the buy-in you need from the decision makers and now you have plans to measure everything under the sun, from billboards, to pay-per-click campaigns, to social media. You’ve created scope documents and measurement plans until your fingers bled. To quote one of my favorite movies, Independence Day, now it’s time for “the really icky part”: deployment.

Let's Rewind a Bit…

If you’re familiar with deploying web analytics tracking on your site and your campaigns, you are surely aware of the time and effort that may be involved. For the less technically-inclined, it’s easy to get lost in all of the Javascript, URL tags, and parameters. Luckily, there are some powerful (and free) tag management tools out there to help streamline this process as well as improve the load time of your website. These platforms provide a single place to manage, change, and deploy all of your tags, regardless of their source. With this in mind, you should consider developing a strategy for tag management for your measurement initiative.

Creating a Tag Management Strategy

After you have established what you will measure by aligning business goals and objectives with the right KPIs in your measurement plan, it’s time to get the how in place. This starts with getting the right people in a room (or conference call) together. The IT personnel and webmasters should be present, as well as any marketing and advertising partners that will be involved with any of the initiatives that are to be measured. During this meeting, establish any technical requirements or limitations that may exist when it comes to analytics deployment. It is imperative to identify any constraints at this stage, as any roadblocks may require additional planning and maneuvering.

After you’ve gathered sufficient information, it’s time to take a look at potential tag management solutions. It is important to understand the great deal of time that can be saved when using tag management solutions. It provides a single place where you can manage tracking scripts and tags and only requires a single script to be placed on the website to be tracked. This is ideal when you have large quantities of tags to spread across a site.

There are a handful of excellent platforms out there that offer a great deal of flexibility for multiple analytics and measurement tools. Google recently announced their own free solution, Google Tag Manager. This platform has clearly been designed with Google Analytics in mind; however it offers great flexibility when it comes to using it to deploy scripts for other solutions as well.

If you’re not a fan of Google, there are other tag management solutions out there. UberTags is a powerful paid solution that allows for 3rd party scripts.

Less Time, Less Headaches

Large amounts of time and effort go into preparing tactics for measurement of campaigns. Implementation of tracking scripts can take up even more time than the planning – but it doesn’t have to. Identifying the right tools to help reduce deployment time can spare your organization unnecessary headaches and create efficiencies that lead to saving more money.