• by Paul Cook , February 1, 2011

CMOs increasingly have to focus on the ROI for Web properties. There are many online ways to draw customers to your site and its product, including advertising, re-targeting, affiliate marketing, search. But which sources of traffic are delivering real buyers? Where should you increase your marketing spend -- and where can you cut back -- if it isn't delivering customers?

The answers could be hiding in your ad tags and in a Tag Management System. (Tags/pixels are pieces of code used by the entire digital advertising industry to track the performance of online campaigns and analytics.)

Today's modern businesses have multiple Web sites, microsites and domains across differing brands, regions and often countries. Many have multiple formats (Flash, HTML etc.), and significant numbers of third-party vendors. Each adds more tags to your site, creating scores of incompatible reports tracking the effectiveness of each channel.

Moreover, too many tags slow down page loads, which kills incoming traffic and hurts sales. In fact, approximately 10% of traffic is lost for every extra second a site takes to load. Google now factors page-load times into its page rankings. Excess page tags are a headache for IT, since they are time consuming to load, manage and remove.

Tag Management Systems not only provide a clear view of which sources of traffic lead to the most conversations they help you direct your spending to the most productive channels. Plus, they will also take a load off the IT department by making it fast and simple to manage all tags. But not all TMSs are created equal.

Here are a few things you should ask a potential TMS supplier:

•Does it do what it says on the label? A tag management system, needs to be able to manage (any and all) tags and assist with associated privacy and reporting challenges. Don't get hypnotized by a slick interface that simplifies basic marketing pixels, only to find out you need a new system to manage and trial more complex tags like A/B testing, Live Chat, Segmentation, Attribution, Social Widgets etc. Ask for multiple live examples of clients running complex tags.

•Who owns this product and why? If you choose a vendor such as your agencies' in-house tool, a data-provider or ad-server to provide basic tag management services (known as a simple container), will they ensure it works seamlessly with a competitor's tags? Who owns the data? Who else has access to that solution? What happens when you have to change agency, analytics, ad-server, data provider?

•How old is this business/product? Do you know how much money you lose for every minute your site is down? Who else in your sector is using this platform and why? Do they have training and support services in the time zones you need? What is their infrastructure, fail-safe guards, etc.? Is this the main product they offer or will they give up support of this product in four months' time?

As our industry moves towards a data driven media ecosystem with technical and regulatory challenges, there will be more pixels, tags, widgets. Investing time in researching tag management systems, now will save you a lot of pain and money in the future.