Due to rapid development of the digital marketing landscape and growing emphasis on analytics, marketing professionals and business owners require more data from their users in order to improve website and marketing performance. Those simple snippets of code are sometimes known as ‘web beacons’ or ‘tracking pixels’, and they provide valuable insight into the performance of various online assets. Here are the most important facts about marketing tags that must be understood in order to reap practical benefits from them:
What are marketing tags used for?
In the broadest sense, tags ‘fire’ or send information to your analytics or marketing tools to notify that tool of one or more user actions (e.g. form completions, sales, page views).
In practice, they can be used for content personalisation, retargeting and building effective audiences and deciding which content on your website and marketing channels are driving leads, sales and views. Tags should accompany every piece of online communication in order to provide access to additional website data that can be analysed to spot persistent tendencies. It’s fair to say that marketing tags remain a primary driver for performance quantification.
What types of tags are there?
- Pageview Tags monitor every visit to each page on your site, this allows Web Analytics and Marketing platforms to ascertain how users engage with your content.
- Conversion Tag these fire each time your users purchase a product or complete a lead form (or any other action you would qualify as a Conversion)
- Event Tag outside of conversions, you may want to get information about other actions users take on your site that gains insight into site navigation and purchase intent, for example Newsletter sign ups, Navigation clicks, Telephone link clicks. These can be captured by event tags.
Tags come in many different formats, it’s necessary to understand how different tags to teach particular important event or action on your website. For example, tags can be used for user identification across various platforms, while conversion tags are needed in order to track how many people are buying or enquiring about a product or service. Marketing tags can be created with multiple program languages, such as JavaScript and HTML. Tag Managers such as Google Tag Manager have numerous templates which don’t require much technical knowledge or coding experience.
How to set up and track marketing tags?
This is most commonly done with specialised software known as tag management system, which allows simple and intuitive adding and removal of marketing tags to online properties. Some of those tools, like Google Tag Manager, are fairly accessible to beginners with no coding ability, which is why they are widely utilized by small companies and larger corporations alike. Those programs allow for manipulation of numerous tags and their integration from a single screen, greatly simplifying the process and facilitating more convenient management of large-scale campaigns. Some training (or at least practice) is necessary, so in most companies this task is assigned to a specialised marketing manager or analyst.
