Slow Loading Tags

According to a recent article in NY times Impatient Web-Users Flee Slow Loading Sites, 400 milliseconds is too long. Thirty-seven percent of consumers find performance issues when visiting a website unacceptable, and 86% of users will leave a site after having bad experiences, according to another study from Compuware.

When it comes to tracking what consumer’s are doing on websites, marketers need to use many third-party tags from web analytics, email, search, ad servers, online testing, behavioral targeting, social media, and more. These systems get very complex and often use Javascript which can slow pages down, making it harder to track conversions especially when the user experience has been compromised. See this Compuware Load Testing Infographic to view key findings from their survey and learn exactly how slow tags, that result in poor page performance, negatively impacts your bottom line. In fact we proved in our recent study that, “Just One Second Delay In Page-Load Can Cause 7% Loss In Customer Conversions.”

We’ve developed a list of four important questions that every marketer should ask their IT departments (or vendors) about their site’s tags:

1. Are our site’s tags loading asynchronously? This enables the site’s tags  to load independently to the rest of the page, rather than sequentially which ultimately increases page load time.

2. Can our suppliers guarantee the speed of their tags? Understanding the speed of all of your site’s tags will better help you understand overall page-load times.

3. Are we using a high-end tag management system? Essentially, high-end tag management systems can force thresholds, and not every tag management system can guarantee this so beware. 

4. What impact will our site’s speed have on conversions? Website optimization with a tag management system can improve your site’s speed bringing you more visitors who stick around and ultimately improve your conversion rates. Use the real-time ROI calculator to see how much revenue you potentially can gain speeding up your site by 1, 2 or 3 second, based on real client data.

Learn more about optimizing page-load times by downloading (or forwarding to your IT team) TagMan’s latest white paper, “Smart Loading Tags to Accelerate Your Website’s Performance.”

Fuelled by our very own (and very talented) technical team, TechBlog is dedicated to sharing how we tackle unique challenges through interesting solutions. Not only will you hear more about the magic that goes on behind the scenes at TagMan, but also our take on the latest ideas in the software community.

To kick things off, check out a special welcome post from Paul Cook, founder and CEO at TagMan.

You can also follow @TagManTech on Twitter.

Here’s a summary of our top five predictions for 2012 with the full explanation on Adotas:

1. Tag Management to experience major growth from 15% to 50% adoption amongst US IR100.
2. Internal technology and data scientists will play a crucial role in online marketing.
3. Consumer privacy laws will drive investment in opt-out technologies and tag management systems. 
4. 2012 will be the year for “complexity managed” by advertisers starting to use platforms like our own (TagMan) to house and integrate all new services to build a single view of their online audiences.
   
5. Attribution will move on from topic of discussion to mode of reporting.

Do you think we’re right? What are your predictions?  Post in the comments below.

 Image Credit: dreamstime

It can be hard to believe, but build vs. buy is still a debate in a variety of tech circles. This came to mind recently when we watch a video posted by analytics expert Jason Thompson in which he debates the merits of roll-your-own analytics systems.

Now with digital measurement consultancy Keystone Solutions, Jason is an industry veteran, having worked for companies including Omniture and Spark Networks. We caught up with him to ask if he sees any merit to building in-house tag management systems.

“Buy vs. build really applies to everything. My philosophy is that companies should be investing their time where their talents are, and tag management is no different.  Anyone who’s on the client side and deploying analytics tags or marketing tags – there are so many different tags out there – they start to develop their own tag management. It’s an easy step to take.

“When I was on the client side,  that definitely wasn’t where we had talent. Our talent [at dating site owner Spark Networks] was hooking people up. While we definitely had smart developers and engineers, it didn’t make sense for us to build our own tag management system.  It’s better for them to spend their time building algorithms that match people together.

“There was no way we could possible keep up with everything that’s going on in the space as new tags are being added by vendors, as new technologies are coming into play, there’s just no way we could scale that.

“We may build a fantastic system, but there’s no way we could support that. In six months it’s going to be outdated. We don’t have the resources that a company focusing on doing tag management has. It’s not our business.  It’s simply much better to buy tag management so that as a company we can focus on what our core competency is.”

This is the second of a two-part interview. You can read Part 1 here.

How do you find out your site has a page load performance problem?

There are a number of services out there that provide really complete monitoring of your page load times. Those range from fairly simple services that are often free. They ping your site, or a couple of pages on your site, and tell you about page load times. There are fancy, more sophisticated and comprehensive services that will ping your site from a variety of locations, including international locations, and do it on a regular basis. They’ll give you back reports that tell you which pages on your site are loading, what your average page load times are, and in some ways even more important that average page load times, how much variation there is.

It’s just not the case that there’s a single number that represents how fast your pages load. It varies a lot depending on where people are coming in from, the time of day, what your server volumes are, what pieces of the site they’re trying to access.  There’s not just one number to look at here, but there are a number of services that provide that kind of information and intelligence on an ongoing basis. It’s not super-expensive for the most part. It’s something companies who are serious about their web site would be well rewarded for investing in.

Are all tag management systems created equal when it comes to increasing site performance?

I don’t think so. Tags in general have become a more significant part of the performance problem. Web analytics tags tend to be some of the heaviest tags on pages. As far as  web analytics goes we have a similar temptation to what I spoke about earlier in terms of user interfaces: it’s natural enough to want to include as much functionality as you can, and sometime that leads to fairly weighty tags. Many tag management systems can actually help reduce the burden tags place on your site.

Many of our enterprise clients don’t have just one tag on their site, they often have half a dozen, 10 or 12 tags. That starts to add up. It’s just one piece of the overall page performance equation, but it’s a very controllable piece.

Most tag management systems give you at least some benefits when it comes to tag loading, but there are very significant differences in the way tag management systems are engineered and the way they take advantage of what’s on the page. Some simply load in a tag governance system but they don’t improve the performance that dramatically.

Then there are ways the tag itself can be engineered to actually improve the performance loads. All those things are significant. The bottom line is the faster your tags can load and still do the job, the more room it gives you to play with the user interface and still have fast-loading pages. It’s definitely a win-win situation where if you can make the measurement component really tight and fast, it gives you more opportunities to do things and experiment and build out your page GUIs without impacting page load times.

Any final thoughts?

One thing that I really wanted to talk about in the webinar is what I often see people not pay enough attention to when they think about page load times. People often over-focus on a few pages on the website. There’s the homepage in particular, and then sometimes the shopping cart functionality. Those are vitally important pages, I’m not going to argue against that. But we have seen sites that were good about optimizing those pages but they let significant performance problems creep into other areas of the site. I’m going to present a case study in the webinar of one client who let that happen to their search functionality. Search is a critical intermediate step between the home page and the shopping cart! Yet it’s not something people really measure on an ongoing basis.

One of the points I want to make is to really explain you need to understand a wide variety of page performance issues across your site. Sometimes there are systems within your site, like search, that will perform dramatically differently than the rest of the site. So it’s really important to look at page load times across the spectrum of pages in your site and try to optimize them – and be aggressive about that.

Please register to attend the Sept. 29 webinar.

We caught up with Gary to learn more about what he’ll be discussing, and who should sign up to participate. This is the first of a two-part interview.

Who’s the target audience for this webinar?

That’s a really good question. It’s not always one individual person who’s responsible for page performance. Marketing folks in general are not responsible for the page load times on the site, but they need to be deeply concerned with it.  They’re the critical influencing constituency who need to let the IT side of the house know what they need from a page load perspective. That’s one audience. Those aren’t the people who are charged with making those page load times happen. They’re not on the design side, they’re not on the IT side, or the network side. They’re the people who have a real stake in what happens with the website and whether page performance is going to impact their bottom line, so that’s one natural audience.

There are deep technological issues involved in this issue to and it’s critical for that audience to understand how technology can impact page load times and also how important page load time is to what they’re trying to accomplish.

A second audience I see with tag management issues is increasingly as we look at enterprises evaluating tag management systems what we’ve found out is it’s a little bit different from people who have gone out and looked at web analytics tags. With web analytics tags, generally performance doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. When people are evaluating a tag management system, the IT folks who are heavily responsible for network performance and overall performance of the system are heavily involved in those decisions, so naturally this webinar is intended for those folks, too, to give them a really good sense of what a tag management system can accomplish and what they should think about and look for in terms of technologies that can really drive performance of the page. They’re the people who have to make the technical decision about what will help accomplish those goals.

Really, the webinar is intended for both those audiences: people on the IT side of the house who are thinking about tag management from a technology and a network perspective and really need to understand will it improve page load performance, what can I expect from it, what are the risks and issues? But also for the marketing guys so they understand what the potential benefits are so they can be influencers in that decision.

How much awareness is out there of page load time being potential problem?

I think there’s been a pretty substantial increase in awareness around that. A couple of years back people had gotten a little sloppy about monitoring their page load times. Pages were getting heavier and heavier. But a couple of factors have focused people on the degree to which this is an important problem. A number of studies were released that really suggested slow-loading sites had a significant impact on the conversion rates and satisfaction rates of sites. That got a lot of attention. In general we went through a cycle of web page getting heavier and heavier and heavier, partially because they could. So many people moved to broadband, and broadband rates have been increasing. It’s been a lot easier to load up technology and fancy elements on pages, and an inevitable tendency to do that.

At some point you do hit saturation levels.  Maybe we did go through a cycle of a lot of people had done that then said, “Wait a minute.  My page looks great and is full of fancy stuff, but every time I load it, it takes a heck of a long time.”

There quite a bit of awareness, actually, that it’s a real problem.

It also tends to be one of those problems that can fly under the radar. There’s vivid and immediate benefits to fancy design. People see that and experience that. A lot of the time, the people who are evaluating the website are on really fast internal websites, so they’re not aware of what everyone else is doing.  It’s a problem people are aware of, but it’s still a problem that slips into the background just because the things that challenge it and cause the problem are much more immediate, visual and visceral than problems in performance loading, which are often hidden from the people who have to make decisions about those things.

The interview with Gary will continue next week. Meanwhile, please register to attend the Sept. 29 webinar.

We caught up with him to discuss tag management in the context of web analytics, organizational change, and implementation best practices.

Q: Where does web analytics intersect with tag management?

A: The interest for tag management is really growing as a way to formalize the process of managing tags. In the past I think TagMan was much more about campaign attribution, how you were going to measure and allocate marketing dollars and make sure you get the right figures. Now I think it’s about how you manage the process of tagging, going back and forth between business and marketing requirements: “here’s what I want to measure,” and IT understanding how to place the tags. There are always little issues and it’s an iterative process. The goal is having good quality data.

One discussion around tag management is that you can get rid of IT. It’s just an illusion.  You need someone in IT to understand how tagging really works.  I think the illusion some people have is that marketing will be able to manage tags by themselves. I don’t think it’s true. Tag management is useful to formalize the process and maybe ease the collaboration between marketing and IT.

I’ve never heard the argument that tag management can eliminate IT, but rather give marketing more autonomy in the process. Is that accurate?

There’s maybe more autonomy, but up to a certain point. The main issues I always see are that as long as you are in the informational part of the website; anything that’s content and usually template-driven, you put the tags in the template. That makes it easier to manage them. When we say IT, it may just be a web developer or web integrator. Those people know about JavaScript, they know how to put the tags on the web page.

So what are the advantages of tag management to marketers?

Tag management  provides greater autonomy to make simple changes, especially if the tags are encapsulated into snippets of code that can be easily embedded. So maybe the marketer doesn’t have to understand everything technically, but knows if they put that on my web page I can be tracking social media or outbound links, for example. If you know you’ve got the right piece of code, the marketer can put it in the tag container and know what they’ll be tracking.

Marketers can have high confidence that if they add something to the tag container it will work. The other advantage is to increase the confidence that the tags are working on every single page of the website. It’s a kind of interesting challenge. I’ve done a lots of website audits and an interesting issue is a page that doesn’t have any tags.  So using a tag management system is not an absolute guarantee you’ll have tags on every page if they weren’t there in the first place.

So it’s not just a matter of deploying tag management. There needs to be an audit to make sure everything is fine when you deploy the tags. Often a 404 page, for example, has no tags. If you deploy tag management and forget to tag that page, it’s an issue.

What steps should be taken to implement tag management correctly?

There’s a need to do an audit to know what is tagged, how it’s tagged, missing tags, what are the various tags being fired? It’s not just a matter of having a Google or Omniture tag on the page, but also ad networks and other tags to be managed. So audit, review the implementation, reassess the business needs so you don’t collect the wrong data or data that is not useful. You want to reassess that.

Configure the various containers that you will need for every type of page. So part of the audit is reviewing the templates. For a checkout process you may have three pages, and one is special, it’s a ‘thank you’ page.  You need a different set of tags on that type of page. Using tag management also makes it easier to have a development QA production setup. You can make sure that when tags are in production they are foolproof.

Next week, in Part 2 of this two-part interview, Stéphane Hamel discusses the future of tag management.

Shanti Shunn, Director of Online Marketing at Harry and David

Shanti Shunn, director of online marketing at Harry and David, discusses why e-commerce sites need tag management, how tag management has evolved, and how to select a tag management vendor.

When and why did you decide you needed tag management?

At Harry and David we’re in all the multichannel markets, we have a lot of third-party tags on our site that relate to tracking and/or CPA payouts. I built my first tag management about 10 years ago, back when it was still called pixel wrapping. You had people who would touch multiple channels and check out, and you’d have multiple third-party tags firing. Based on them touching multiple channels, you’ve reported that order to multiple vendors.  And of course you’re reporting 100% of the order, so you have three different vendors who show the order as one of theirs.

It came down to attribution and at the same time order tallies based on the last channel touch. You don’t always want to optimize to that, but you want to facilitate the visibility.

So if you have multiple CPA vendors you’re reporting a percent of that order out, so you report that same $100 order to three CPA vendors and one’s 5%, one’s 10%, one’s 15%, you’ve respectively paid out three times on that order. Your margin goes out the door because you’re paying everybody, and you’re not paying for their contribution in closing that order, you’re paying them for the full order. Affiliates play a big part of that piece because you can’t send them a partial amount.

Can you estimate how much money you’re saving through tag management?

I would easily say more than a quarter million dollars in excess payouts. At my previous company we probably saved the company in excess of half a million to more than three-quarters of a million in the first year.

It ends up paying for itself, especially if you have a very robust affiliate program or you’re doing any type of CPA-based ad purchasing or CPA partnerships. You really only want to attribute and optimize based on their role, first in or last in. There’s a whole world of corrections and cancellations and fraud. If none of that existed, it probably wouldn’t be as good a deal. You have to have the ability to give that order a one-to-one relationship with a channel.

Interesting that you’ve been in the field of tag management for 10 years. How have things evolved?

Back in the day when affiliate programs were really starting to emerge and there were gobs of different networks out there you had a massive pool of CPA orders and more people doing CPA partnerships as more of an exploratory way to pre-test an agreement. One thing I noticed was that every time my confirmation page was loading I was using source code and broadcasting pixels to all my third parties. So I asked, “What do I need to do to clean this up?”

So the first incarnation of pixel wrapping was developed to say: if our system develops this source code as the final source code of record with this transaction, then it becomes associated with a pixel. That’s why it became called pixel wrapping. You associated whatever your onsite tracking mechanisms were to the different third-party pixels.

 Now there are new things bundled into tag management such as site speed, privacy, data collection. Do these features play an important role for Harry and David?

Site speed definitely is part of it. When I was doing the RFP for tag management one of the things I brought up was speed was not my main concern. There is a value to that, but it’s more of a side effect. Tag management has a lot more benefits than asynchronous loading. It’s going to save you money, give you a cleaner view of your business, give third party vendors and partners a clearer view of your business so they’ll be optimizing based more on real numbers.

Whereas if you have PPC advertising, there may be a lot of conversions, but those keywords might have been more of an influencer.

Speed is a benefit given the world we’re in, but I would never recommend somebody go to tag management simply to speed their site up another couple of seconds.

This is the first installment of a two-part interview. Come back next week for more!

A good question, yet one many marketers, web analytics and IT departments are ill equipped to answer. To help them address this critical question, Forrester Research has developed a six-point tag audit and tag management scorecard to help all parties involved determine their level of tag management risk.

The audit poses questions regarding the number of tags on a site, the time and frequency involved in changing or updating them,  and the number of parties involved in the tag management process.

The simple audit is included in Forrester’s report How Tag Management Improves Web Intelligence. Feel free to download the report and receive step-by-step instructions to audit your own tag management needs.

Tag management is evolving rapidly, and so is the news and information surrounding the topic. To help keep up with it all – and to help marketers, e-commerce providers and web analytics professionals make sense of it all – we’ve launched a new monthly newsletter, Tag Management Times.

In it,  you’ll find new research, best practice recommendations, news, and case studies around the topic of tag management. We hope you’ll subscribe – and share your thoughts and suggestions with us.