Why Marketers Need a Tag Management System

guides them through the process of defining audience groups, determining appropriate actions for different customer behaviors, and feeding those actionable segments to an email marketing provider, a CRM solution, or any other relevant platform.

"The tool is very intuitive and easy to use. Many of the prompts are customizable, meaning a marketer can adjust any of the categories to better fit his needs," Erik Bratt, Tealium's vice president of marketing, says. "We're giving marketers the power to make sense of all the data they collect, and use it in a meaningful way."

Ancestry.com, a company that helps users trace family histories, became a Tealium customer in June 2013, and has been using the vendor's tag management solution to strengthen its marketing arm. In the first week of working with Tealium, Ancestry.com was able to get more tags live than it did over a period of seven months, Mark Fiske, senior director of digital marketing at Ancestry.com, recalls. Before working with Tealium, Ancestry.com relied on roughly 50 tags, but has added more than 150 to its data layer. Now the company is in the middle of the integration process for AudienceStream, and is already seeing results.

"AudienceStream allows us to standardize the definition of different segments across all of our marketing channels and create a truly unified view of that customer for the first time," Fiske says.

In the past, it took Ancestry.com roughly 24 to 48 hours to make any changes to email marketing messages because collecting data, analyzing it, and forwarding it to an email marketing solution was so complex, but Tealium's technology cut the process down to three to four seconds by streamlining it with limited IT involvement. Ultimately, the tag-based approach to defining audience groups allowed Ancestry.com to start effecting changes in marketing messaging across all of its channels immediately, according to Fiske.

"We're able to use a lot more of the data that's available to influence our marketing across channels where we previously weren't able to, and have that richness of data and richness of interaction with the customer," he explains.

Since launching AudienceStream last year, Tealium has continued to innovate, creating what the company calls "the industry's first data layer wizard." While a TMS would ultimately put tag management into the hands of marketers, the initial implementation of a traditional system would still largely rely on IT. Tealium's wizard, however, is designed to help marketers tackle that TMS implementation hurdle, and take more control of weaving their digital technology stack through tag management to create a deeply customized marketing cloud.

The wizard guides users through a series of steps to bring different solutions and applications together, grouping them into bundles sorted by channel and platform. The result is a comprehensive data layer, presented in "one common language" and one interface that enables marketers to "mix and match" their solutions across vendors, Jay McCarthy, vice president of product at Tealium, explains. Tealium's goal, Chief Marketing Officer Tracy Hansen adds, is to provide customers with a do-it-yourself approach to the marketing cloud.

"We don't want clients to be limited by the marketing clouds that big vendors like Salesforce.com or Adobe have built. We want to give them the chance to build their own marketing cloud, and give them the freedom to choose any number of solutions that work for them," Hansen says. "Some customers are able to get what they need from just a few vendors and have fifteen to twenty tags in place," she adds. Currently, Tealium supports almost 700 vendor tag integrations, which makes adding a new solution or building an entirely customized marketing cloud "super simple," Hansen says.

A Word of Caution

Despite the simplicity and depth of functionality that the industry's top tag management solutions can offer, even the most powerful tag tools can't solve the entire data dilemma that most companies face. While a tag management solution can help with organizing data and making it actionable, it's up to marketers to harness insight and determine which actions to take.

"Tag management solutions can get you a ton of good information, but marketers have to make sure that their companies are actually set up to use that information. Once you get the data, you have to analyze it, visualize it, and act on it," Scott Houchin, managing principal at eClerx, a company that provides operational support, data management, and analytics solutions, says. "Otherwise you could be spending over 10 percent of your marketing budget on tag management, and end up with all this data that you're not acting on. That would be a total waste," he adds.

Though tag management is not an "easy fix" for a complex problem, a powerful tag management solution could "get you halfway there," according to Altimeter Group's Jones. The space is maturing quickly, and so is adoption. With the right combination of business intelligence and marketing solutions to take full advantage of its capabilities, tag management can become the cornerstone of a brand's marketing technology stack. "At this point, it's plain and simple: You need tag management," Jones says.

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Maria Minsker can be reached at mminsker@infotoday.com.

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