Web Analytics Tagging Tool (WATT) is a simple PHP script you can use to add additional advanced Web Analytics tags to your pages. Using the output of WATT, you can easily track actions such as button clicks, purchases, registrations etc. and see what people do on your website.
Are you tired of searching through your website’s source code to find important information? Do you need to insert data into your web analytics but don’t want to spend a lot of time coding? Well, I have the solution for you: Web Analytics Tagging Tool.
Are you using Web Analytics Tags for your Ajax, Flash and Java Script? Maybe not. One of the challenges of tracking a site, especially if it has only been recently launched, is that tags can be difficult to implement correctly. They can easily break other functionality, such as flash banner ads or drop down menus. NOT any more! Just enter the URL of your site in the box below and click on “Check My Tagging” to see how well you have tagged your site…
The role of a technical web analyst is, by nature, multi-disciplinary. They will find themselves straddling the boundaries of their organisation’s data teams, IT function, privacy team and the digital marketing team, all with competing requirements and demands coming to them from all angles. Early recognition of this, as well as the critical role your data will have to the decision-making of these groups, will be key to your success in the role and in amplifying the value of web analytics to your business.
It is key as it guides you away from unstructured and ad hoc work in tag management interfaces with a view only to answering the pressing question of the day or getting the next tag, towards strategic thinking about how your website and business functions, towards what data points will offer sustained value over time and to building out of a robust, reliable and rich data set that anticipates questions and helps your business to quickly make good decisions and tailor the customer experience with confidence.
In web analytics then, as with much else, planning and stakeholder communication is key. We therefore recommend that that is where all web analysts start out – with a robust needs analysis process – whether they’re designing an implementation for a new website or they’re inheriting a solution that is underdelivering on the insights and reliability front.
Analytics needs analysis and planning
Here at Merkle, we adopt a ‘goal tree’ based approach to help our clients decide what to track. This approach recognises that whilst most clients only have one or two key goals that they want their users to achieve when visiting their site, a business cannot effectively understand or optimise the experience with only information on whether a user has achieved the intended goal. Instead we recommend that you think about the tens or hundreds of smaller interactions that users will take on the site, that build up to that end goal, and think about those in the first drafts of your measurement plan.
To illustrate this point, consider a standard ecommerce website. It’s trivial to say that the key goal for most will be the placing of an order. If you were only tracking those orders, alongside the pageview or sessions that come of the box with web analytics solutions, it would not be so trivial to find where there was room for improvement. Is it your checkout funnel that is the problem? Or is it your product pages? Do you know whether there even is opportunity in your conversion rate and whether the easiest next dollar would come from focusing on improving average order value?
By considering these types of questions in advance, you can find the levers that will be at your disposal for future optimisations and, crucially, you can anticipate many of the questions that will come down the line, while also prioritising what to collect.
Once you’ve decided what will be key for your analytics implementation, you need to stop and consider what other functional requirements you’ll need to satisfy. It could be that your IT team will expect to use the web analytics tool to detect JavaScript errors on the site, and to monitor page loading performance. You’ll need to speak to them and clarify what they’re expecting and capture it in your implementation design.
It could also be that your marketing function will expect you to manage their media pixels for them. These usually come with bespoke tracking requirements and typically expect different data formats and, on occasion, personal identifiers like email addresses and phone numbers to be passed to them. Again, you’ll need to speak to these stakeholders and confirm upfront what they’ll require.
At this stage, it’s time to distil your requirements – with associated business cases – down to something more tangible in the form of a data layer design, and get this implemented.
Here are some of the leading tag management tools available now:
1. Google Tag Manager
This free soft-tagging tool from Google can create and manage event tracking tags, marketing tags, analytics tags and custom html or JavaScript for web and mobile. Using Google Tag Manager for tags aside from the few built-in types can be very challenging, but it is a good, simple tool to manage Google Analytics tracking and AdWords conversion tracking.
Pricing: $0
2. Tealium iQ
Tealium iQ is an enterprise-level soft-tagging tool. It boasts a large number of integrations (800+) with marketing and analytics solutions and features like privacy controls that make it attractive to enterprise users.
Pricing: based on user requirements
3. Tag Commander
Tag Commander is enterprise-level tagging management that provides out-of-the-box integration with a large number of advertising, analytics, personalization, testing and optimization, and retargeting solutions. It additionally offers simplification of privacy compliance, real-time conversion de-duplication, easy mobile tagging, and an intuitive tag building interface.
pricing: based on user requirements
4. 7tag
7tag is open source tag management from the makers of Piwik. It offers full privacy and data security because it is run on your own server. 7tag is currently in beta and does not offer any out-of-the-box integrations so you must create all tags as custom HTML.
Pricing: $0
5. Qubit
Qubit provides a wide variety of marketing and measurement integrations: display advertising, retargeting, testing and optimization, conversion tracking, analytics, personalization and many others. Qubit calls itself the most flexible enterprise tag manager because its features are highly extensible and customizable and it can be managed via an API.
Pricing: free below 1M pageviews per month, and $99 USD per 10M after that
6. SuperTag
SuperTag enterprise-level tagging management can be used to manage analytics, A/B testing, content tagging, conversion tracking, behavioral targeting, and live chat solutions. SuperTag also promises fast page performance.
Pricing: based on user requirements
Tagging tools are also offered as part of many analytics and marketing platforms like Adobe, AT Internet, and the Ensighten Marketing Platform. These can be a good choice if you are already using one of these platforms since they will offer good integrations and features specific to the logic and conventions of those tools.
Tag manager and analytics set up
Once you get to the stage where the data layer is substantively complete, it is then time to turn to the user interface of your tag manager to set up the collection of the data to your analytics, and marketing tools. In many ways this is the ‘easy’ bit, as you could in theory start working independently without involving your stakeholders around the business. We caution you against this approach though.
If you want to keep your new-found friends over in the Privacy and IT teams, it’s especially important to keep them in the loop at this stage. For the former, it will be important that you keep them aligned on, for example, how you’re technically incorporating use consent in to your set up as well as when finalising the list of technologies that will be installed on the site. In all likelihood, any contract review stages will have included a privacy review for each technology but it’s important to keep them in the loop in case any specific controls were agreed that have been lost somewhere along the way.
For your IT team, their involvement is important as you will want to coordinate any code releases on to your site. While the risk from using a TMS and established technology vendors is very low, you will want to know that they’re on hand in case anything goes wrong and that you’re also not making changes when other business critical processes are being updated. It may also be that you’re working on a site with strict content security policies and, in that case, you’ll need IT involved to allow-list any recent technologies before publishing them live.
At this stage it’s also common to fall into a few implementation pitfalls. The most widespread problem is when working with media pixels or similar tools where you’re provided with implementation guides to ‘copy and paste’ into the page. While most tag management solutions support this – for example with Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager or Custom JavaScript Tags in Ensighten – we recommend you take the time with each tag to check there aren’t templated tags available within your tag manager for the tool you’re implementing. These templates, as well as standard built-in variables and – as opposed to custom coded solutions – will make your implementation more robust and more maintainable.
Another widespread problem is in failing to get the sign-off from the stakeholder requesting the implementation. We recommend you help your team understand how to test their tool to meet the acceptance criteria of the end requester and that you get your IT team to QA the release prior to go-live.
Ongoing maintenance of your tag manager set-up
Once your main implementation project is complete, you need to make sure you have robust processes in place to maintain your solution properly. This covers many things, but one of the easiest things to overlook is the continuation of the relationships you built up over the implementation project. If you stay connected with your IT teams, you’ll be able to steal a march on any new analytics or implementation work required for new features or areas on your site. These relationships will also be helpful in making sure that future site changes don’t break your data layer and in agreeing reasonable processes for releasing new versions through your TMS.
Besides just new features, you should consider how you’ll keep your container fresh by establishing processes for removing tags when your marketing teams no longer require them as well as ways of working where your privacy team can easily audit and request changes to keep your set up compliant.
Conclusion
Surf Canyon is an open source tool we built to help make web analytics tags easier for us and our clients. We do a lot of website builds for fortune 500 companies, and these sites often talk to multiple analytics providers so managing all their tracking codes can be time consuming. We’ve found that just about every site talks to Google Analytics, but have had a much harder time finding a solid way to integrate Omniture or Adobe Analytics.
We are happy to introduce our new Web Analytics tagging tool, once you add/insert your source code on your website and hit save button, tags will be added automatically. This is very important for Google Analytics tracking and helps you easily identify your analytics data. Tagging will improve accuracy of web-based analytics reports and allows for easier troubleshooting.