The Importance of Tags

John Follett

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Marketers are working in an era where much of what they do is digital marketing. The capabilities for marketers to create stunning digital experiences and track a visitors journey through a website were unheard of less than a decade ago. The increasing sophistication of digital marketing is underpinned by a technology component that many marketers remain ignorant of: the tag. The technologies and applications that leverage tags are legion and comprise the core of marketing’s infrastructure, such as analytics and marketing automation. The importance and impact of tags is such that marketers need a better understanding of them so they can manage them more effectively.

Most commonly, a tag is a section (typically referred to as a “snippet”) of JavaScript code that is embedded in an HTML web page. Tags are sometimes also single pixels that are small and transparent, and therefore visually undetectable on an HTML web page.

Tags are used to transmit information to external applications about visits to the web page on which the tags are embedded. For example, one of the simpler things a JavaScript tag can do is detect and transmit the date or the version of the viewer’s browser. The capabilities of tags to detect, transmit or invoke browser plug-ins go well beyond these simple examples. For the most part, tags exist on web pages and perform their designated functions outside the awareness of the page visitor.

There are hundreds of external applications that rely on tags, including those for analytics, pay-per-click ad tracking, testing, personalization and marketing automation to identify just a few. When a web page visitor’s browser loads a web page containing tags, those tags are activated. They gather the information they were developed to collect, then transmit it to the external application those tags support. A tag’s ability to communicate is not just one-way. They are also capable of delivering content to the web page or browser, such as personalized content, an ad or a cookie.

Examples of how tags enable digital marketing are many. When marketers send HTML email blasts where each message has a personalized salutation (e.g. “Dear Fred”), tags are in use. Tags drive the personalization of web pages, dynamically detecting a new or returning visitor, then serving up content specific to that visitor. Analytics are made possible through the use of tags, and the wonderfully rich set of information marketing automation systems provide is also tag-driven. The growing trend toward marketing attribution is certainly tag-dependent. There are many ways that tags enable function that is critical to marketing’s success; these are but a few of the more recognizable examples. It suffices to say that tags are important and have much to do with the creation of rich, digital experiences.

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