Analytics and Tag Management
Tags, or pixels, are snippets of code that are usually placed in the <head> of a page which enable 3rd-party tracking, analysis, and reporting. They are involved in every marketing campaign implemented online - Google Analytics and other analytics platforms are obvious, but tags are also used for tracking the conversions of a Paid Search campaign, advertising, SEO, remarketing, social media marketing (eg. Facebook Open Graph), affiliate marketing, advanced customer insights and more.
These tags help you track the performance of online campaigns and analytics. However, the more you have on your site, the slower your site performs, which has a negative impact on the visitor experience and ultimately on sales. This happens because websites each tag added to enhance tracking, optimization or other functionality ends up crowding pages with third party tags, potentially slowing down the website. Every extra second a site takes to load results in lost traffic and Google factors page load times into its page rankings, so a slower site can equate to a lower search ranking.
A tag management system allows marketers to add or remove tags used for marketing and measurement without the need to ask from webmasters to change the website code. WordPress plugins that add third party analytics and tags to sites have also proven to be the category of plugins most likely to cause slowdowns, conflicts with other plugins or crash websites entirely.
All of those lines of javascript code, or the plugins that insert them, are replaced by a single line of javascript or a single plugin that inserts the tag management code. The Tag Management System interface is then used to populate the pages with the other types of tags.
Like our other performance optimization features like WordPress Core, Theme and Plugin Updates and Security Monitoring, our Tag Management services minimizes or eliminates slowdowns and disruptions. Instead of 4 or 5 plugins of vastly different quality, we implement the highly respected Google Tag Manager for WordPress (GTM4WP) plugin and integrate all marketing tags via Google Tag Manager containers.
The end result is faster sites, less errors and fewer disruptions.
Marketers, agency account managers, web analysts can launch new tags in minutes / hours instead of days/weeks and maintain existing tags with just a few clicks, with little to no involvement of web developers.
Tags are loaded asynchronously in the page header, deploying only the applications relevant to that page and user. This means that page loads are not affected when tags load and bad code and slow loading 3rd party servers do not slow down the site.
Every WordPress plugin adds code to the website, potentially placing additional strain on the server and interfere with the code of other plugins or the WordPress core. By replacing many plugins that insert tags / scripts with one plugin, we avoid errors, slow loading times, crashes and even security breaches.
Features like a preview mode, automated error checking and error recovery features like version history mean that it is almost impossible for someone to deploy a tag that could break the site. If something does go wrong, see what was changed and rollback to a previous version with a few clicks.
Easy-to-use error checking and speedy tag loading mean you’ll always know that every tag works. There is also a preview mode which allows you to test your tags before you put them live to ensure your tags are firing correctly.
Our standard WordPress implementation of Google Tag Manager includes a number of advanced tracking features by default that can be used to assess the effectiveness of any marketing efforts, like Form Submission tracking, Contact Link Click Tracking and more.
When your hosting account is configured, we will also create a Google Tag Manager account for each website and create user/s for your account with access to the appropriate containers and administrator access where appropriate.
Get in Touch
