How brands can excel with tag management

Kristina: How will Google's entry into tag management kick-start the mainstream adoption of tag management?

Graham Cooke, CEO, QuBit: Google's entry to the tag management industry will really validate the need for companies to adopt tag management solutions. This is exactly what happened with the analytics industry in 2005 when Google bought Urchin (which later became GA). Back then, probably no more than a third of websites were using analytics. That statistic now stands at something like 95% of website impressions are tracked by analytics products to optimise their websites and marketing activity.

At the moment, less than 5% of the top 10,000 websites are using a tag management solution, so it's a less developed space than analytics was prior to the introduction of Google Analytics. Google's arrival can only stimulate more interest and make tag management more accessible to e-businesses. However, enterprise businesses that require enterprise features and dedicated support will continue to look to the more established products in the marketplace. Price will also become a much bigger focus for businesses, so we envisage costs being reduced dramatically as tag management becomes further commoditised.

Kristina: How will QuBit integrate Google Tag Manager into OpenTag to keep its enterprise customers current with Google really effectively?

Graham: QuBit is an authorized Google Tag Manager specialist, and we have already integrated the GTM tag into our OpenTag tag library. All our clients need to do is select that tag from the drop down and add their variables into it. It's as simple as that. Of course when you use OpenTag you get all of the added features that are so vital for enterprise businesses, such as CPA de-duplication, universal variables and cookie consent.

An enterprise-wide TMS such as OpenTag creates visibility over what each of the tags is doing on the site and which referers are driving business. By understanding which traffic sources are actually creating sales, marketers are able to decipher exactly which marketing channels to reward - thus saving money. The amount saved could be as much as £1,500,000 per year for a large ecommerce business (QuBit calculations, 2012). This process of only rewarding the correct affiliates is known as CPA De-Duplication.

Tags: QuBit, tag management, tag marketing, website tags