When you are running a website, you are interested in gathering a lot of insights about the traffic, user behavior, patterns etc. If you are an e-commerce portal, you would also be interested in conversion rate, affiliate marketing etc. All these insights or metrics are collected by including various scripts on your web pages. Let’s learn more about the Tag manager that facilitates easy collection of these data points.
What is a Tag Manager?
Tag Manager is a tool that can inject code snippets in a web page based on configured conditions. Each such snippet is referred as a tag. The tag can be javascript or HTML or combination of both. The tag manager allows you to trigger the tag i.e. to inject the tag on various conditions which could be:
- an URL pattern (RegEx allowed)
- presence or absence of certain HTML element in the dom
- a specific value of a javascript variable on the given page etc.
Individual tags can do several things such as:
- Include an iframe which triggers a pixel to track conversion
- Push certain data to REST API on remote server
- Manipulate DOM
- Report JS errors along with URL of the page etc.
Advantages of Tag Manager
One would have a basic question – why do I need a tool to put JS or HTML on a webpage? Wouldn’t a web developer do that?
Yes. Many-a-times, development cycle takes time to put some functionality on to production environment for various reasons. Tag Manager can do the same job in few minutes. Many of the tags tend to be temporary. With this tool, you can easily turn them on or off. This also helps in quick experimentation on a web page (A/B testing) and after that, a proper implementation could be done through implementation team.
The tags could be triggered by a pageview event or dom ready event or variety of other triggers. And thus one can manage not to slow down the perceived page load times for end users and still achieve the required functionality.
What are the available Tag Managers?
There are several tag managers available in the market:
- Google Tag Manager
- Segment
- Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager
- Tealium iQ
Out of this, Google Tag manager is free and has the highest market share. In addition to all the features mentioned above, it also supports:
- Separate container for each website
- Versioning of the containers
- Built-in support for Google Remarking and various affiliate networks
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Related Keywords
Javascript, Tools, E-Commerce, Adobe, Remarketing, Marketing