TAG MANAGEMENT 101: MAKE YOUR POSTS SHINE
Finishing your blogpost or article is a feat deserving of a night out or that pumpkin spice latte you’ve been craving. But before you finish, you realize you have to tag the post to high heavens and back; how do you determine which tags to choose and are the tags becoming overwhelming? The simple practice of cleaning and managing your tags can keep you sane and help organize your blog and posts to best maximize your SEO.
What is Tag Management?
Tags are snippets of code that are usually placed in the <head> of a page which enable 3rd-party tracking, analysis, and reporting. Google Analytics and other analytics platforms are an obvious tag, but remarketing, conversion tracking, affiliates, and advanced customer insight services utilize tags as well.
Tag management involves the use of code in the backend of your platform. These codes, or tag managers, allow marketing to have control over their own little space on a web page. The 6 or 7 tags on any given page are replaced by a single container. That container holds code that listens to rules dictated in the tag manager’s backend about when to fire which tags.
Tips on Successful Tag Management
First of all, why even consider taking extra time out of your day to manage tags? For two important reasons: management and data governance. Data governance provides directional focus. No data governance and you have a mess of useless information. Tags provide insight for you and the consumer—the consumer is able to better explore your blog and lead them to believe that you are an industry expert helping them to understand why your product or service is a necessity in their lives. They are also important for your content strategy and digital marketing efforts; tags gain traction on Google as they help readers find the posts with the specific information they’re looking for.
Tags, unlike categories, serve as an index for your site or blog. They can help you understand how your content strategy is changing or needs to be changed. When you pull reports in your search for insights, you want data lined up so it is easier to read and digest and this is where management comes in. We’re not talking about simply managing which tags you use; we’re talking back-end metadata. For example, set a product ID to something that makes sense for anyone who looks at the code (myproductatthiscompany.productID). You can then tailor your analytics code to pull information about that data object and compare it to its content value for a specific piece of content or throughout your whole content library.
Google’s Tag Manager is a free tool for managing marketing and tracking tags on your site. If you need a more in-depth look at your content and digital marketing strategy in addition to something provided to you via a free tool like Google’s Tag Manager, contact Globe Runner today!
