THE TAG GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK

Transcription

1 THE TAG GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK HOW TO GOVERN YOUR D I G I T A L A N A LY T I C S A N D MARKETING TAGS Plan Monitor Comply Validate Deploy

2 INTRODUCTION I checked out your website. And what did I find? Broken tags. Which tags? Those little bits of code required to personalize content, collect analytics data, serve advertisements and enable retargeting campaigns. Yeah, they re broken. Here are the facts of life: Tags have a way of showing up unexpectedly, dropping off without warning and breaking down on a whim. Yours are no exception. If your website is large enough, I can say the following with near certainty: There are misconfigured tags on your website. There are unauthorized tags on your website. There are duplicate tags on your website. There are missing tags on your website. You want to fix this. But with millions of instances of analytics and marketing tags on your website...where do you even start? With the right solutions and processes in place, governing your tags at scale is possible. As you do so, you ll be able to trust your data, realize ROI on technology spend and do it all more efficiently than you would be able to manually. You ll get the tags you paid money for. Let s get you started with the Tag Governance Framework. 2

3 Plan Monitor Comply Tag Governance Framework Validate Deploy This framework encompasses the essential components of an effective tag governance program. In the sections following you ll find a description of each phase of the framework, as well as how tag governance solutions play a key role towards accomplishing the objectives of that phase. 3

4 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Clint Eagar Director of Product & Engineering Support ObservePoint Clint proclaims to know a little bit about a lot of things. With more than 20 years experience in customer service and technical consulting and implementation, Clint has become an expert at building, optimizing and marketing websites. Passionate about data quality, Clint was one of the earliest employees of ObservePoint, joining the young company to help support, test, develop and manage the ObservePoint product. Clint is the guy everyone counts on to get things done. If you yell for Clint, he always comes running and always delivers. 4

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION... 2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR... 4 THE TAG GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK PLAN... 7 Too many companies don t plan Building a tagging plan COMPLY... 8 Stop talking about GDPR The Golden Rule of Data Privacy Tag governance is the new hall monitor DEPLOY... 9 It doesn t all start with developers Catching tagging errors before they happen...10 : Your last line of defense before production A job for, not analysts Tag governance and VALIDATE Some tags get stage fright Human error happens MONITOR News Flash: Websites Break Check it again. Then again. And one more time. IMPLEMENTING THE TAG GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK... 13

6 THE TAG GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK

7 PLAN Tag governance plays an important role in helping companies plan out their measurement strategy something that unfortunately not enough companies do. Plan Too many companies don t plan 39% of respondents to our most recent survey said their companies don t document their analytics strategy. Monitor Comply This reflects negatively on tag performance and causes decreased efficiency due to redundancy in measurement strategies. Before you ever start deploying tags or configuring variables on your site, you need to create a plan your tagging plan. This plan documents your measurement and marketing strategy outlining what tag is doing what and why. The planning phase allows you to map your business questions (e.g. Which segment of our customers converts best under x conditions?) against the variables that collect relevant data. The same principle applies for tags that add features to your site: you need to have a plan for when and where they should be implemented. Deploy Validate Building a tagging plan Tagging plans help you avoid data overload. When I worked for Omniture, I was once tasked with helping a client convert roughly a hundred different dashboards with around KPIs each to Omniture data. There were so many metrics, no one actually knew what they were all for. That s the result of poor planning without clear documentation. The same can happen with analytics tags and variables people start measuring all sorts of stuff without really having a good reason why. Having a tagging plan can help minimize data overload because you have to take the extra step to plan before you implement. Part of that planning process involves discovering what you re currently collecting and documenting it. Doing so will help you reduce analytical weight. Tag governance solutions allow you to scan your website to find out what data you re currently collecting. That way you can evaluate what you already have in place that might either be expendable or could meet your current needs without implementing new technology. 7

8 COMPLY Tag governance can help companies make the necessary changes to comply with internal and external controls. Stop talking about GDPR GDPR has incited a lot of panic regarding data privacy and data protection regulations. But people are approaching these mandates the wrong way. Instead of protecting consumer data because the government told us to, we should be more proactive about protecting the customers that we re trying so hard to impress. Plan Comply The Golden Rule of Data Privacy Deploy The other day a young colleague of mine was going on about how cool it was the kinds of data we could collect about people, with the caveat that he wouldn t want the same thing done to him. That kind of mentality can be dangerous to companies not just in terms of legality, but as a matter of brand optics and maybe even ethics. Most controls should come from internal sources. Of course, we have to be externally compliant, but we should use this whole concept of privacy to be a strategic differentiator. Tag governance is the new hall monitor As part of your tagging plan, you should know exactly what types of variables you should collect (user ID, product ID, etc.) and which you should never collect (SSN, address, etc.). Using a tag governance solution, you can scan your analytics tags and variables for specific patterns. So if a variable value matches an SSN, you ll be hearing about it. 8

9 DEPLOY Plan A company that applies tag governance in pre-production environments can fix tagging errors before they get expensive, which is right when they hit the production environment. Comply It doesn t all start with developers As we ve already established, developers are not ground zero: there is (or should be) significant planning that goes into a measurement and marketing strategy before developers ever set their fingertips to their mechanical keyboard. Deploy How does that planning make its way to the developer? Through the product manager, who should be as concerned with measurement requirements as she is with any other product feature requirement. Unfortunately this is not always the attitude product managers take, and tag performance is often relegated to the backburner. A good product manager or analytics architect will ensure the developer knows exactly what sort of measurement requirements should be met with each feature. So when developers go to create a data implementation, they have specific guidelines to follow. Catching tagging errors before they happen How does tag governance fit into a developer s workflow? When a development team is equipped with a tag governance solution, they can scan their tag implementations in a dev environment to make sure tags and data layer variables are populating according to the requirements included in the tagging plan. Finding problems in a development environment is much less risky because the data is fake you re not working with a real customers data, just test accounts. Not only can you ensure that your tags are working as expected, but you can also test for instances of non-compliant personal data before you go to production and make someone upset. 9

10 Monitor Comply Tag governance solutions give quality assurance engineers tools to automate tag-testing in staging environments. Deploy Validate : Your last line of defense before production The job of the engineer is similar to the developer in that she is testing tag performance against tagging plan requirements before pushing to a production environment. The difference is that quality assurance is going to take that tag performance testing to a whole new level running iterative tests under various conditions. Those tests should include tags. When the engineer checks if a button functions as expected, she should also be looking to see if any specified measurement happened as well. A job for, not analysts Historically, analysts and digital marketers were taking it upon themselves to test for tagging errors in a production environment because their data was at stake. The problem with this approach is that tagging errors in production are expensive to locate and repair. Companies have responded and started to rely more on engineers to test against measurement requirements during. Tag governance and As the final gatekeeper before a website moves into production, engineers have an important role in testing analytics and marketing tags. Tag governance solutions help them automate their iterative tests so they can ensure tags are working under various conditions. This keeps website release cycles agile while also minimizing broken code. 10

11 VALIDATE Plan You just published a new release to the production environment. Now what? You need to ensure nothing broke down when you went live. Some tags get stage f right Monitor When pushing a site live, tagging errors are common. To counter the problem, technology stakeholders may take it upon themselves to manually check for errors. But it s an uphill battle. The sheer size of a website (and the volume of tags on the site) makes a comprehensive audit unrealistic. Plus, humans aren t the best equipped to scan mass amounts of data for errors. Validate Human error happens Humans like to take shortcuts and make exceptions. They re not systematic like a computer program. So even if you had the human resources to check for tagging errors on each page of a website, you wouldn t get as bulletproof results as you would from an automated test. Replacing manual spot-checking with tag auditing, monitoring and validation can help you test your tag implementation at a more accurate rate (and much faster). 11

12 MONITOR You need to monitor tag performance at regular intervals. When tagging errors crop up, you want to be the first to know. News Flash: Websites Break In a perfect world, a fully-functioning website in production would never have problems. But it s never a perfect world. Somehow some volatile personal data makes it into an analytics variable, or an additional piggybacking tag crops up from an ad-serving tag. Plan Consequently, you need to continuously test in the production environment to ensure everything agrees with that tagging plan you created oh so long ago. Monitor Validate Check it again. Then again. And one more time. Tagging errors appear in production all the time. But you can t have someone spending all their time monitoring tags to make sure they are up and running. A tag governance solution can do the heavy-lifting here, periodically scanning your live site and checking for any tagging errors. 12

13 IMPLEMENTING THE TAG GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK Digital analytics and marketing tech present significant value to your company when implemented correctly. These technologies rely on tags, and tags rely on proper implementation. By using an automated solution to govern tags at all phases of the framework, you can achieve greater data accuracy and actionability in your organization. How many broken tags do you have on your website? You can t really know until you check. Schedule a demo with an ObservePoint rep to get a first look at your entire tagging implementation. Or just stay in the dark. Either way. SCHEDULE A DEMO