Posted by Andrew Edwards on March 16th, 2011 at 9:29 pm

In a former post ("Tag, You're 'It' (1)"), I discussed some of the technical ways in which the all-important task of tagging can become bogged down in developer cycles and thus in some way stand between the user and good reporting.

Today I would like to approach the subject with a slightly altered viewpoint.

First, why is tagging so important?

Second, what can be done to make it easier to manage?

Let me start on a necessarily discouraging note.

As Avinash Kaushik has often pointed out, analytics is hard, and requires from its practitioners a high degree of skill in order to deliver value. And it gets worse. Tagging, at the heart of complex, meaningful analytics, is even more difficult to manage than "untagged" analytics. Add the two together and you've got a strong case for going to the marketplace in order to find the necessary expertise.

But now for a bit of a lift.

First, the basics of tagging again, for those that missed it last time or who are still wondering what a tag means to their analytics effort, as follows:

Tags are multi-part code/image markers that are pre-planned, built and placed by the web site owner or their agent onto the web page, such that activity on that page is observed and delivered in granular fashion to an analysis engine (think Google, Omniture, WebTrends) in order to build accurate reports for marketers and decisionmakers.

Tags are important because: without tags, you are not collecting all the data you could be, nor are you collecting data with near as much accuracy as you should be.

Without proper tags, you are prone as well to shallow reporting. For instance, what if you wanted to defeat the "last click wins" syndrome of conversion attribution? Without any tag management strategy, it will seem as if whichever campaign was the last click before conversion, should get 100% of the credit. But with some of the new tools on the market, you can get an understanding of the relative importance of different clicks/campaigns as the repeat visitor works closer to conversion.

And here is more good news: Yes, there are new ways to manage the growing amount of tags that accumulate on a page--even without being a tagging expert.

While there may be others in the market, I will mention two products that help manage and empower tags. The first, TagMan (disclosure alert), is a partner of my company; the second is Ensighten. While in many ways different, they aim to solve a similar problem: tag overload, tag competition, tag management. Both are gaining ground in the nascent tag management marketplace.

What makes them attractive is that they get marketers past the need to involve developers in tag deployment and management; and give marketers a way to manage tags swiftly and efficiently (however, someone still has to understand how to develop KPIs and create custom tags).

Let me repeat: with tools like TagMan and Ensighten, the notion of "hand tagging" goes away. The need for endless developer cycles and tag breakage and tag misplacement goes away.

What also goes away is the need to rely on the tag's creators (especially if they are created by an ad network) to parse and report on the activity. These tools take all tags and put them into an easier-to-manage interface that lets analysts get a view of tag deployment, tag quality and tag importance in an environment free of technical concerns.

As important as any other factor, these tools are independent of any analysis engine, any tag-creator, any entity telling you how "their tags" showed you performance for "their content" (especially as regards campaign tagging). You can be much more certain of the actual page usage based on tags managed not by your ad-serving company, but through a tool like the ones I've mentioned. We've even heard of data coming out of these tools going back to the ad networks to prove how some of the charges from ad networks may be excessive based on actual performance. So these tools can literally save you money on the spot.

Finally, using tools like these, you can defeat the problem of tag overload. Many times, carefully tagged pages end up with additional tags and conflicting tags over time. These can result in page-load problems or conflicting report problems. With a tool like TagMan, for instance, you end up with just one tag on the page; and the rest of the data-parsing takes place inside a protected envelope that can swiftly execute the tag functions without overloading the page's native code with too many unmanaged tags.

Perhaps one of the more interesting trends being revealed by these "truth-telling" tag management tools is that organic search is often well undervalued as relates to paid search; but that is just an example of how these tools can help you understand your traffic in ways you might not have been able before.

For any company that relies on tags robustly and yet struggles with such problems as tag deployment, tag management, attribution and overload, this rather new class of tools should offer some some real relief.