The top risks of third-party tags come in the form of site stability and page load  performance. In the next three sections you can read how the architecture behind tag management systems can dramatically lower these risks. The focus will be on tag management methodology; how the tags are served; and how data is sent to the third-party vendors. You will see comparisons of different tag management solutions and an explanation of the benefits or risks associated with each.

Risk #1: Site Stability

One of the biggest pain points that tag management can improve is site stability. When you add a third-party tag or tracking pixel to your site, you’re leasing away a portion of your site’s stability. Many vendor tags have been known to slow down your site or even break it. Tags are infamous for blocking your pages from loading or making your pages go blank. Every tag on your site is another potential point of failure. Additional tags increase the potential for site stability issues.

A tag management system can reduce those risks with asynchronous loading or conditional loading of external vendor tags. Another option is to completely outsource your vendor tags to a third party. All of these choices are good for improving site stability, but be cautious about relying on an external vendor’s architecture as their shortcomings will be intrinsically linked to your site.

Tag management systems offer two common methodologies: client-side and server-side. The server-side systems collect data from your web pages through a third-party tag. The data is transmitted to the third-party’s server, processed, then sent to all of marketing vendors’ servers. This method lowers site stability risk, but it doesn’t cover all third-party tags.

The client-side systems can reduce site stability risks even more due to total coverage of all third-party tags. There are two different types of client-side systems, one that uses a “dynamic” delivery method and the other that uses a “static” delivery method.

Dynamic delivery sounds cool, but it’s a greater risk for site stability than static delivery. Dynamic means there are multiple layers of servers (web, app, database) responding to your requests. Each layer has its own service-level agreement (SLA), so you’re only as strong as the weakest link. You’re actually only as strong as all of the links put together, meaning the probability of site failures go up by adding the possibility of failure in each layer. For example, if each layer has a 99 percent SLA and there are three layers, the overall SLA can only be 97 percent. Each layer has a 1 percent chance of failure, so add up each layer and the overall system as a 3 percent chance of failure at any given moment.

Static delivery utilizes multiple layers of caching and geographically distributed servers for greater stability, scalability and performance. Static delivery uses content delivery networks (CDNs) with thousands of servers in nodes around the world. Even if multiple servers go down, you still have an extensive array of alternate servers and nodes available elsewhere. With this redundant architecture, you will never have an issue with the tag management system blocking your pages from loading.

Static delivery is also the best way to address scale on the Internet, especially for serving HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (third-party tags). With static delivery you only need to use the CDN, so you don’t have the increased risk with multiple layers of servers. This type of delivery is exactly how companies like Netflix can stream videos to millions of subscribers.

Risk #2: Page Load Time Performance

Each third-party tag adds at least 50 milliseconds to your page load time on the first visit to your site. The average tag takes well over 50 milliseconds to load. If you have 10 tags on one page, that can add seconds to your page load time. “Time is money” rings true when frustrated visitors leave slow-loading sites. A single slow-loading tag can add seconds to a page load or even completely stop the page from loading.

Server-side tag management systems can reduce the number of tags on your site, which will improve page load performance, but this type of system cannot manage all third-party tags. You will still need to rely on managing the remaining tags by yourself or through a client-side tag management system using dynamic delivery or static delivery.

Dynamic delivery systems are very similar to server-side systems because they have multiple layers that can cause slowness. The dynamic delivery system relies on a server to balance requests from all clients, another server to execute logic specific to a client, possibly another database server where configuration information is stored, and then it can finally respond to the original request. This layered process is repeated for every page viewed by the visitor. Each layer introduces latency, adding around 50 milliseconds of page load time per layer.

In a system that contains three layers, you can imagine a tag management system that takes at least 150 milliseconds to respond, if everything is perfect, compared with a static file that is delivered in almost no time at all.  Static delivery systems simply eliminate the latency and risk created by multiple layers, so the tags are delivered that much faster. Plus, the files are cached in your visitor’s browser further reducing page load times on each subsequent page view. It just doesn’t get any faster than that.

The Best Tag Management System for Your Business

Each choice for tag management systems improve site stability and page load time performance to varying degrees. Server-side systems are like a car without enough gas. Their benefits only go so far, because they only cover a portion of the tags. Client-side systems with dynamic delivery are the next step in improvement, but they still contain the added risk and slowness of multiple layers. Finally, client-side systems with static delivery outperform the others by removing the risk and slowness associated to the additional layers while taking advantage of browser caching for the fastest delivery system known to man.

Tealium iQ is a client-side system with static delivery, making it the fastest tag management system that reduces the most amount of risk associated with third-party tags.

Tealium’s seamless vendor integration gives marketers and business users the ability to easily add, modify or edit the web page tags (also known as pixels) of any vendor through a convenient web interface. To add a vendor tag, users simply search or scroll through a comprehensive list, select the appropriate vendor, fill out their account data and other information, and hit publish. The vendor’s tags are instantly added to the web site via Tealium’s proprietary technology, and the marketer is ready to use the solution to help increase online business results.

“Tealium makes the complex simple, by giving us complete control over our tag implementations,” said Jeremy Hermanns, vice president of performance marketing for Onestop Internet, which runs the e-commerce operations for several major apparel retailers, including Nicole Miller, Hudson Jeans, Reef and many more. “We can add any vendor in minutes, and then easily manage those tags on our own without requiring IT assistance. Tealium has saved us hundreds of man hours by simplifying the entire tag management process.”

Read the full release …

For the uninitiated, tag management makes it easy for marketers to deploy and manage the various web page tags (also known as pixels) that most digital marketing vendors require. Web analytic providers, affiliate marketers, re-targeting companies, personalization vendors, they all require you to put one or more – in some cases many – tags on your web site to measure the impact of their solutions, or to perform some other function.

Over time, as online marketing has grown, the number of tags on the average web site has mushroomed out of control. Tealium estimates that most enterprise web sites have between 30-40 tags embedded within the HTML of their web sites.  One Tealium customer has a whopping 120 different vendor tags.

Tag management solutions typically provide one tag to manage all the other tags. In Tealium’s case, this is accomplished through a self-service interface designed specifically for marketers and business users.

So now that you know what tag management is, what are the specific benefits for online marketers? Here are five key benefits:

• Increased Agility – Does this sound familiar? You just contracted a new online vendor – let’s say a re-targeting company – but before you can launch your first campaign, you have to wait for your over-burdened development team to add the tracking code to your web site and put it through testing. Depending on their schedule and release cycle, this could take days, or even weeks. The same goes for any type of modification to the tags. With tag management solutions, marketers and business users can deploy and manage all the vendor tags by themselves with point and click simplicity. This means marketers can get their campaign out faster, while freeing valuable IT resources.

• Improved Site Performance – Replacing all those tags on you web site with a single universal tag dramatically lower page load times, which directly impacts customer satisfaction and conversion rates. Even a one second delay in page response can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions, according to KISSmetrics. If your site is slow, that can translate into millions in lost sales. Site performance is typically seen as an IT issue, but it can have a dramatic impact on online business results.

• Improved Vendor Selection – Often times, if you’re in the market for a particular marketing solution, you may want to A/B test a couple of different vendors before making your decision. To do that, you need someone to develop a script so you can serve out different pages and tags to measure the results properly. This could take many hours, even days depending on resource availability. With tag management, you can set up split segmentation between different vendors within minutes. Soon you’ll know which vendor is delivering the best results, allowing you to make a data-driven decision.

• Avoiding Vendor Lock-in – In years past, online marketing vendors, especially web analytics vendors, held the upper hand in the vendor-client relationship. That’s because it was an enormous burden to remove all the tags from every page of the web site, and then deploy new tags. With tag management solutions, it’s very easy to de-tag and re-tag. For example, one Tealium enterprise customer was able to re-deploy an entire customized Omniture SiteCatalyst implementation on their global properties within four hours. That was unheard of a couple of years ago. Vendor lock in is a thing of the past, giving marketers better choice and control.

• Protecting Consumer Privacy – Tag management makes it easy for marketers to protect consumer privacy by allowing site visitors to easily opt out of tracking. Tealium, for example, supports the new “Do Not Track’” feature within new browsers. Using this feature, visitors can easily opt out of tracking, regardless of whether your digital marketing vendors support the initiative or not.

Other tag management benefits include commission de-duplication, and better web analytics implementations, which translate into better data and better decisions.

Tag management is growing quickly as marketers, web analytics professionals, e-commerce managers and developers get wind of the tremendous value it offers across the organization. To find out more, please download our free E-book, “Buyer’s Guide to Tag Management.”

For more information, read the full release.

Remember when you were young and participated in relay races? Kids were divided up into lines and the first person in line carried a baton, ran to a spot at the other end of the school yard, came back, handed the baton to the second person in line and that person then took off and repeated the action.

Web browser technology is surprisingly close to this childhood game. Web pages are made up of elements including HTML text, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript libraries, and images. When a visitor requests a web page, the browser requests the HTML source from a server. When it comes back, the browser requests the next element in line and so forth.

What if the person in front of your line was incredibly slow? You’re likely going to lose the race, right? What if every line had a kid that was slow? This race could take forever to actually finish. And what would happen if a kid just ran to the goal and actually never came back? The other kids in the line might wait indefinitely.

Well, browsers have tackled these “elements” that don’t run fast or don’t come back in two ways. One way is to move elements to other lines that may be available and are moving quicker. Another way is to simply timeout the request for that element and let the next element in line go. Timeouts vary in value, but they are typically measured in terms of seconds and under default configurations that I’ve seen range from 5 seconds to 120 seconds. This is a “per element” timeout.

Now if browsers had unlimited lines, then who cares if the elements are slow or never come back? Well, browsers don’t have unlimited lines. This is important to understand. The modern browsers of today, including your mobile devices, have in the range of 2-8 lines depending on the browser and device. I could go into a detailed rant about people at work or school accessing the Internet behind proxies and how that impacts your lines, but I’ll cut to the chase and say, it doesn’t make it better.

Today’s web sites have a lot more elements than you would think. My own Facebook wall has more than 140 elements. Every icon you see is an element. Most styles and placements are driven by CSS markup that’s loaded as an element, and most form validation messages or pieces of dynamic content are driven off JavaScript code that’s loaded as an element or elements. Companies have well-tuned and tested servers that are able to push all these elements through 2-8 lines in your browser very effectively.

Enter the digital marketing tag … the slow-moving kid of the 21st century.

The digital marketing tags you place on your web site make requests that sit in line beside all your other web site elements. So guess what happens when they run slow? One under-performing request here or there is not likely to make any noticeable impact to the customer experience, but you can imagine what might happen if your customer’s browser has 2 request lines and you have an under-performing digital marketing tag in each line.

These tags typically point to third party, multi-tenant systems that exist out on the Internet somewhere. You don’t have control over how well their servers do the job. The larger vendors are more experienced and protect you under some form of SLA (service level agreement), but these SLAs are rarely if ever 100 percent. The free version of Google Analytics doesn’t even offer an SLA. Servers and services go down, they get overburdened and have to be restarted. Last week, I read about a server that had to have its traffic rerouted because of a denial of service attack. What if that server was responding to your digital marketing tags? What if your collection server was also collecting data from Fox Sports when Tim Tebow beat the Steelers in the shortest overtime in NFL playoff history?

How can this problem be addressed? The answer: Tealium’s ability to kill slow-moving tags.

The idea behind the concept is simple: don’t wait for the slow-running kids. Forget about them, let them go play, and don’t make the other kids wait. Tealium gives a tag a certain amount of time to get back to the line. If it doesn’t come back fast enough, we move on. If something goes wrong with some of your digital marketing tags, your customers won’t know the difference.

Some people will lead you to believe the urban myth that killing tags loses data. Maybe it is essential for you to collect this data regardless of how badly it slows down your site, but hey, at least you’ll have accurate abandonment metrics right?

In my experience this threat of data loss is simply not true. Let’s look back at our relay race example, and let’s implement a “tag killing” relay race. John is at the front of the line, Sally is behind him, and Dave is behind her. The three of them know what their job is: run to the destination and run back. So John takes off running, makes it to the end of the schoolyard, but is too tired to come back, so he stops to catch his breath. Sally and Dave wait. After a couple seconds, Sally decides, “John is taking too long, I’m going”. She runs her relay and Dave runs his. Several minutes later John walks back to his line to find Sally and Dave have already gone back to class.

John, Sally and Dave are your marketing tags. So did John get lost? He seemed to make it to his destination; he even seemed to eventually come back. He just didn’t come back fast enough to suit Sally, so she stopped waiting for him and moved on.

This is how Tealium’s technology works. It’s essential to both tag management and to effective online marketing. As a digital marketer, tags are important. Your customers and their experience, however, are more important.

We at Tealium understand the importance of digital marketing data, it’s in our DNA. We also understand site performance and its impact to your customers. If you’re not killing your slow-performing tags then maybe your users will abandon your site … and go to a site with faster kids.

• For more information, read the press release on Marketwire.
• Read the article in TechCrunch

The recommendation came from Shmuel Tennenhaus, director of affiliate marketing for Big Fish Games in Seattle. Here it is:

“Eric is the Sherlock Holmes of web tracking and pixel tracking. He is the fastest responder to anyone I have ever worked with. Eric is constantly upping the game and finding workable solutions for complex issues. He is a delight to work with. And he is the sunshine in my work days.”

Congrats to Eric and his team.

What’s the best one to buy? Do I need one that can run flash? The iPad doesn’t support flash.. If Steve Jobs didn’t think flash was important, should I? What’s the hidden cost of buying a non-Apple product? There is definitely a hidden cost of choosing a PC over a Mac. I wish I could have the hours of my life back that were spent re-installing Windows in order to get it to be fast again.

As a web marketer, you’ve probably experimented with the “low-cost” pay-per-click engines. You can get visitors to your site for just 1 cent. Unfortunately, when you look at the data, they all bounce. If you look further, the keywords they’re coming from don’t have any relevance. It’s better to go with Google Adwords where your 20 cents gets 1 good visitor as opposed to paying 20 cents to get 20 bad visitors.

In the Tag Management space, you’re making a decision similar to choosing the iPad 2, Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet. This requires research. And, ultimately asking yourself, what do I need to do and what is the best technology for this? If you decide, “I want my tags to load as fast as possible to increase my data accuracy” — then Tealium iQ is the answer.

Here’s what you’ll uncover in your Tag Management research. Most other platforms will require that you send everything through their processing engine. They act as the “middle-man” server. Besides being slow, there is a significant cost to choosing this technology: if you choose to go with a middle-man technology, the tag vendors are no longer required to hold up their SLA. They can’t hold up to performance requirements when there is a middle-man slowing things down. Tealium technology is different. We do not introduce a middle-man.

We invite you to further inquire about the technology differentiators between Tealium and the rest. We’re pretty excited about being the best technology platform available for your tags.

In order to illustrate this, consider the figure below, which shows a web page containing 4 tags, loading synchronously. Each tag on average takes 250 milliseconds to load with the exception of the second tag which takes over 2 seconds to complete. Because of this single slow-loading tag, the entire page now takes over 2.5 seconds to complete.

Slow loading tag impacting page performance

One method used to speed up this process is using asynchronous loading of tags. Another method is slow tag killing, which is the process of terminating the under-performing tags.

To demonstrate this, consider the figure below, which shows the same scenario with both asynchronous and slow tag killing methods added. In this case, the criteria for slow tag killing is set to half a second. With both features added, the load time is reduced by almost 2 seconds to slightly over half a second.

Example of slow tag aborted using tag management

According to a recent study by Gomez, a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. Knowing how every second counts, slow tag killing can be a valuable method for improving site performance and usability.

Next Step:

Learn more about Tag Management
Request a demo of Tag Management Console

• Loading of tags based on source of traffic – for example, customers can set rules to load an AdWords tag on the confirmation page only if the traffic originated from an AdWords campaign.

• Loading tags only once – many tags need to be loaded only once during a session or per visitor. For example, if you’re launching a retargeting program for the shoes section of the site, you only need to launch the retargeting pixel once.

In order to demonstrate this capability, consider a web site deploying five different vendor tags on its confirmation page – as shown below. With traditional tagging, all 5 tags or pixels will load on the confirmation page regardless of the source of traffic.

Tag loading without conditional load rules

Conditional tag loading on the other hand lets you decide under which circumstance to load each tag on the confirmation page. As a best practice, you can create rules that let you load the AdWords tag on the confirmation page only if the source of traffic is AdWords, and do the same with other marketing tags. This alternative is shown below.

Tag loading with conditional load rule

Conditional loading of tags offer several advantages:

1. It improves page load time by dramatically reducing the number of pixels being called from the page (from 5 to 1 in our example).
2. It puts marketers in total control as to how and when they share critical data (i.e. transaction data) with third-party vendors. Rather than sharing all transaction data with all vendors, marketers can now share data on a “need-to-know” basis.

Next Step:

Learn more about Tag Management
Request a demo of Tag Management Console