You know the movie trope that involves a makeover scene during which the so-called nerdy girl takes off her glasses for the first time, lets her hair down (or pushes it back from her face) and becomes suddenly beautiful?
Tag management is that so-called nerdy girl.
Although website tagging doesn’t get much attention, it’s a key element of first-party data capture and post-cookie measurement. Guess that means tagging has got a date to the prom.
(I’ll stop now, sorry.)
The point is this: Tagging is critical in light of the phaseout of third-party cookies in Chrome, says Karen Stocks, VP of global measurement at Google.
Historically, so much of measurement has relied on third-party cookies.
“But with deprecation coming – and with privacy regulations – something as simple as tagging, which has been around for so long, is going to be crucial moving forward,” Stocks says, “because it can give advertisers really good first-party data on how customers are interacting on their site.”
Tags, you’re it
Just like third-party cookies, a tag is simply a snippet of tracking code.
But whereas third-party cookies are set by a domain other than the one a person is currently visiting for the purpose of cross-site tracking, personalization and measurement, web tags (usually JavaScript or a pixel) are placed by the website owner.
These tags are used to collect first-party data about visitors, such as whether they click on an ad, view a video, download content, browse products or add an item to their cart. That information can be shared via tags directly with third-party partners, like an analytics service, a platform or a CRM provider. Advertisers and publishers deploy and manage the tags on their sites through a tag manager.
Using these little code snippets, businesses can continue to operate and collect data in a compliant way, despite regulatory and privacy-related changes, Stocks says.
“The future of measurement is first party, consented and modeled,” she says. ”And the majority of first-party data is captured through tagging.”
I caught up with Stocks recently to talk tags.
AdExchanger: Why should marketers prioritize tag management now?
KAREN STOCKS: It’s always been important to have a good tagging setup. What’s changed is that you used to have a backup in the form of third-party cookies. If you didn’t tag your page properly, there were many other players in the ecosystem dropping third-party cookies and capturing a ton of information.
But that will soon go to zero, and if I’m not getting solid first-party data, I’m going to struggle to measure conversions on my site, to calculate ROI and to optimize.
Tagging has been around for so long that people kind of glaze over when they talk about it. It’s been in the background. But it needs to come to the forefront of the conversation about what durable measurement looks like in the future.
How do tags support privacy needs, like collecting and respecting onsite consent choices?
You need a tag to capture data, but the data itself doesn’t give you permission from the customer to actually use it. And, depending on the region, you need to get consent.
Let’s say you’re in Europe and you use a mechanism, like a cookie banner, to get consent. That is the interface with the consumer. Their choice is shared with the publisher’s consent management platform, and a tag would read that information to know how to behave and whether and how it can use the data.
How does this work in Google’s universe?
We have something called consent mode within Google Tag Manager that allows advertisers, primarily in Europe but also in other parts of the world, to link their tags with their consent banners so they can indicate to their partners whether they have consent. But even getting the signal that certain information isn’t consented is helpful because that allows us to do better modeling for our advertisers in terms of what they can expect to see from their conversions.
We’re also working on launching codeless consent mode, which has been a big ask from our advertisers so they can use [consent mode] more easily out of the box.
Speaking of new stuff, Google released a new feature in Google Tag Manager in September so that site owners can deploy Google Tags in Google Tag Manager. Why weren’t they compatible from the beginning?
Google Tag Manager is an overarching infrastructure that you can use to run multiple tags, and it’s existed for a long time. Google Tag was released last year [and replaces the Google Analytics 4 configuration tag]. The news is that now you can launch Google Tag through Google Tag Manager.
It was something advertisers were asking us for, and we worked on it in the background while prioritizing making sure that we could meet all of the other challenges in the ecosystem with foundational tags. But now we’ve rolled [Google Tags] in for the sake of simplicity.
In that vein, I read recently that Google started automatically anonymizing IP addresses before that information gets shared with Google’s reporting tools via server-side tagging. [Similar to the artist formerly known as Gnatcatcher!] Why make that move?
Google Tag Manager gives advertisers the ability to decide what they want to share and if they want to anonymize data before they do.
But we’re continually working on our tags and the way they operate to make sure we have the highest level of privacy, which is why anonymizing [IP addresses] server-side in GTM is a customer requirement we’ve worked on.
At the start, you referred to site tags as a third-party cookie backup. Would it be too reductive to think of site tags as a third-party cookie replacement?
Tags are not a third-party cookie replacement. Third-party cookies can track users across sites without permission, which is one reason why they’re getting deprecated.
When we talk about tagging, it’s a first-party data relationship between the end customer and the site. There’s a big difference between first-party data that sits within an advertiser’s control and third-party cookies, which are primarily used within the third-party ecosystem.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Thanks for reading! A high-five to you from me and from this cool cat. As always, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected] with any comments or feedback.
