Page load timing is one of the most important factors in website design and implementation, and every millisecond can have a big impact on how your visitor perceives your website and brand. A slow website will turn-off visitors immediately and make them bounce. We have observed many times that companies start off with a good, clean website that performs well but as the company grows, the website goes through a lot of changes, the addition of third party tools for different activities and features, irrelevant tagging, broken codes, and so on. These might cause the website to slow down significantly.
Tag management and its importance
There are hundreds of third party marketing and tracking pixels on every enterprise website that require correct implementation, maintenance, and upgrades at the page level. But managing tags is a bit of a challenge for businesses. If the tags are not maintained appropriately or there are issues with incorrect/incomplete tagging then they can make the website sluggish or generate wrong analytics results. Traditionally (and even now), IT teams used to handle tags and this delayed the process of adding/editing the tags. But now businesses are realizing that tag management must be an efficient process that can be concluded within hours and not days. This has given rise to the adoption of tag management tools and services. Nabler helps many clients shift to advanced tag management tools that enable them to make their website faster and analytics more reliable.
Ineffective tag management hampers visitor experience – A case study
One of Nabler’s clients is a popular audio technology leader who used Google Universal Analytics and was facing the challenge of increased page load time and tag management issues. The client’s website had over 500 pages with Google Universal Analytics implemented directly in the source code. The analytics team was completely dependent on the internal IT department for any simple addition/modification of tags and this caused a delay in analytics and decision-making. The website was also revamped recently to give a better visitor experience but it came with its own set of problems. Direct implementation resulted in an increase in the page load time, which hampered the experience instead of strengthening it.
Migration to Google Tag Manager
After auditing the client’s existing website and tag management process, Nabler suggested implementing Google Tag Manager (GTM). Our team helped the client migrate the code base from website to GTM. We coordinated with the stakeholders for clarifications on data sources to capture the data in web analytics tools. We also tweaked the tracking codes while migrating the tags. We first deployed all the tags in the Staging site with complete quality assurance and then we replicated the implementation from Staging to Production site while repeating the QA process.
Resolving challenges during the tag migration process
Each client is different and so the challenges faced during the migration were also unique. Nabler tried tagging the Google Map API using custom HTML script. During the QA process we noticed that this resulted in multiple tags firing for the same event. We overcame this challenge by implementing Tags using Macro with custom JavaScript as a macro type. Another error encountered was for Location search tag. For the location search box on the website, the user could access the location by either clicking on the “enter” button on the keyboard or by clicking on the “search” button on the site. The problem faced was when a location was searched, multiple tags were fired; one for the enter button and the other for the mouse click. We overcame this challenge by using the dom click listeners and the jQuery event handlers.
Benefits of migrating to Google Tag Manager for the client
With an advanced tag management solution and efficient migration services provided by Nabler, the client achieved several advantages:
- Optimized tag implementation: Earlier it used to take at least 2-3 days to implement new tags. With Google Tag Manager, it’s a matter of a few hours.
- Minimized tagging errors: Since the process is less arduous and there are fewer people involved, it requires less QA effort as well. The debugging options in GTM help us to see which tags are firing correctly and thereby take corrective actions for any issue.
- Reduced page load time: Migrating to GTM helped the client solve the problem of increased page load time.
- Less dependence on IT team: The client’s marketing team can now add or make changes to the analytics tags easily without relying on the IT team.
- Single tag management platform: All the analytics and marketing tags are now in one place for the client to view, add, or modify.
Nabler’s tag management services
Nabler offers a complete set of services that start from TMS vendor comparison, migration of code from the website to TMS, capturing all data sources, tweaking tracking codes, implementing advertising tags and beacons, data auditing, implementation enhancement, testing and optimization, and more. Nabler helps companies seamlessly integrate various third-party tags for ad serving, web analytics, widget integration, social media integration, conversion tracking (email, PPC, display, etc.), remarketing/retargeting, A/B testing and MVT, customer survey, etc. Our in-house software services team is proficient with most of the leading tag management solutions in the industry including Google Tag Manager, Tealium, TagMan, Adobe DTM, SuperTag, Ensighten, BrightTag, etc.
To conclude
Effective tag management is critical for today’s organizations as it can directly have a positive impact on website performance, user experience, marketing campaigns, and ROI. Utilizing digital marketing effectively and measuring it accurately requires advanced tag management capabilities that are possible only through tag management systems.