Part 1: How to create an effective tagging plan

Recent market research reveals a surprising fact: "75% of executives don't trust their data". If you're one of those 75%, this blog series is a must-read. As companies collect vast amounts of data through their digital tools, the need for effective performance tracking becomes essential to guarantee future success. This series of articles will provide you with information, strategies and tools to improve your performance tracking practices, build confidence in your data and achieve better business results. Don't miss these valuable resources designed to enable digital managers like you to make informed decisions and lead your organization to success.

Why is a tagging plan essential?

A well-defined tagging plan is essential for all stakeholders, as it ensures accurate and consistent data collection to meet business requirements. It facilitates precise campaign tracking, accurate ROI measurement and relevant data analysis, enabling informed decision-making, optimized resource allocation and regulatory compliance. By guiding developers through the implementation of tracking, it strengthens marketing strategies and improves user engagement. As many stakeholders are involved, clear processes need to be designed to facilitate data governance and information sharing.

In short, a tagging plan is essential for accurate, consistent and actionable data, to improve decision-making, user experience, regulatory compliance and the achievement of corporate objectives.

What is a tagging plan?

A tagging blueprint is a highly detailed document describing the process of implementing and managing tags on websites, mobile applications and other digital platforms. This "tag blue-print" is essential for collecting and analyzing data on user behavior, campaign performance, conversion rates and overall website effectiveness.

Implementing a tagging plan involves defining stakeholder objectives, identifying tags and their position on websites and mobile applications (including MarTechs and media), implementing and testing these tags, maintaining and managing changes, and ensuring effective evolution and adaptation.

The benefits of a tagging plan are manifold. It improves data quality by ensuring consistent and accurate data collection. It improves analysis by providing a better, expectations-based understanding of user behavior and website performance. It promotes better decision-making by enabling data-driven decisions to be made to improve your website or application, and reduces errors by minimizing the risk of missing or inaccurate data.

In short, a tagging plan is a crucial tool for any website or application owner who wants to gain valuable insights from their data and make informed decisions to optimize their digital strategy.

What is the most common process for implementing a tagging plan?

To ensure that a website or mobile application achieves its sales and marketing objectives, it's essential to clearly define them and put in place an effective monitoring system. This not only enables performance to be measured, but also the user experience and results to be constantly optimized.

Implementing a tagging plan involves around 25 to 30 key steps, from defining objectives to checking that everything is triggered correctly.

In this first part, we'll describe the first steps in creating a tagging plan.

One of the keys to success in implementing a tagging plan is full automation of the design, implementation, commissioning, maintenance and ease-of-use process.

It's a set of tasks that need to be based on a platform that automates all processes.

#1 Define objectives: identify the key indicators and events to track on your website/application :

To effectively implement a tagging strategy, it's essential to start by identifying clear objectives. Determine the purpose of tagging, whether it's to track user behavior, perform marketing analysis or monitor conversion rates. It's essential to involve stakeholders from the outset to understand their requirements and expectations, and to ensure that all points of view are taken into account. Once objectives have been defined, it's important to establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that will be monitored. These indicators will serve as benchmarks to measure success and encourage continuous improvement.

By aligning tagging strategy with business objectives and stakeholder needs, you can improve data accuracy and gain valuable insights for your marketing actions.

Implementing a data governance process requires a shared workspace to design, share, organize and maintain all repositories: tagging, data, confidentiality and stakeholders.

#2 Gather input from all stakeholders:

In any project, it is essential to gather input from all stakeholders to ensure success, i.e. all internal and external individuals or groups with an interest in the project.

Gathering information can be a complex task for several reasons:

• Diversity of perspectives: each stakeholder group has its own needs, expectations and concerns.
• Diverse timetables: stakeholders also have their own agendas, which may not match those of others.
• Data collection methods and technologies, each with its own advantages and limitations.
• The volume of data collected can be considerable, and requires careful forward thinking to focus on what's really important in order to produce meaningful information.
• Data integration and synthesis: the information collected must be integrated into a coherent overview that can be used for decision-making.

That's why we recommend creating a central database. This means creating a structured, easily accessible, shareable and updatable system for storing and managing all associated documentation, configurations and scripts. This keeps the tagging plan up to date with the latest best practices and standards, and encourages a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration between team members to increase the value of the repository.

Centralizing will help all stakeholders from all areas of the company to define single objectives, translated into data to be collected, which will be centralized in a single point to facilitate the evolution, collaboration and maintenance of the marking plan.

By following these recommendations, you can create a central repository for your markup plan that is well-organized, easy to use, shareable and maintainable over time. This facilitates regular communication and engagement with stakeholders throughout project implementation, ensuring ongoing adaptation and increased satisfaction.

#3 Draft DataLayer specifications :

Creating a DataLayer specification is essential to ensure accurate data collection across your entire website. Start by defining the purpose and scope, detailing the structure and key variables such as page details, user information and product specifics. Describe the specific events to be tracked, such as page views, CTA clicks and form submissions, and provide sample code snippets for implementation.

Develop a comprehensive data validation and testing plan to ensure accuracy. Keep documentation up to date and establish a maintenance plan for regular audits. Involve stakeholders from analytics, marketing and IT to harmonize efforts and ensure comprehensive data governance. This structured approach will improve data accuracy, provide valuable insights and effectively support your marketing strategies.

Setting up a central repository for your DataLayer ensures that it is well organized, easy to use, shareable and maintainable over time. This approach facilitates regular communication and engagement with stakeholders, particularly the IT department, throughout project implementation, ensuring ongoing adaptation and increased satisfaction.

By following this specification, you can create a robust and comprehensive DataLayer that will support your analysis and marketing efforts, providing valuable insights and improving decision-making capabilities.

#4 Configure CMP to manage consent-based data collection and integrate it into your TMS:

To ensure compliant and efficient data collection, it's essential to set up a Consent Management Platform (CMP) to manage consent-based data collection and integrate it with your Tag Management System (TMS). A CMP helps you capture and store user consent for data collection activities, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as RGPD and CCPA. By "integrating" CMP with your TMS, you can automate the process of respecting user consent across all your tags and scripts.

This integration ensures that only tags for which consent has been granted are activated, thus respecting user choices and maintaining compliance. To achieve this, you can set up triggers and variables in your TMS that verify user consent before tags are executed.

Again, setting up a central privacy repository ensures that it is well organized, easy to use, share and maintain over time. This approach facilitates regular communication and engagement with stakeholders, particularly the DPO, throughout project implementation, ensuring ongoing adaptation and increased satisfaction.

By configuring a CMP and integrating it into your tagging plan, you can boost your users' confidence, enhance their experience and mitigate the risks associated with data privacy regulations.

In summary, the successful implementation of a tagging strategy requires clear identification of objectives, full stakeholder involvement and meticulous planning. By defining key metrics and events, you align the tagging strategy with business objectives, ensuring accurate and useful data collection. Gathering input from all stakeholders is essential, as it encompasses diverse perspectives and expertise, enabling a more holistic approach to data governance. Establishing a shared, well-organized and easy-to-manage central repository facilitates continuous improvement and collaboration. This ensures that the DataLayer remains up to date with the latest best practices, promoting effective decision-making and improving overall project success.

By integrating all these elements into a centralized base, you can create a robust environment that improves data accuracy, stakeholder satisfaction and the ability to adapt to changing business needs.

Data On Duty natively offers the most effective features for managing an end-to-end tagging strategy, automatically generating your tagging plans and ensuring optimal governance.

Data On Duty transforms 22 of the 24 manual steps into 6 automated ones.

The whole process takes a few hours or days, compared with several months with conventional tools.

With Data On Duty :

• You get 100% accurate, relevant and compliant data to meet all your business needs.
• You regain control of your tracking process and your data, while maintaining your technological environment.
• Your work is simplified and accelerated for all stakeholders, including agencies.
• Your data analytics operating costs are cut by up to 80% in the first year.

To find out more, request your free private workshop.

Read the introduction to our Guide to effective tagging governance to find out more about harnessing the power of tagging!