We talk about the Internet as the most measurable medium. But you know, the medium
doesn't just go and measure itself. As with the other media, you've got to actually go out and collect some data.
Unlike traditional media, however, the technology behind the
Internet lends itself to such data collection -- hence the "most measurable" title. And of course, I'm talking about tagging.
As an old-guard media researcher here in the
new-world digital space, I figure about half of you know way more about tagging than I do, and the other half, not so much. So for the older-school half... A tag is a piece of code on a web page
that logs user requests for content elements (the page itself, or a video or ad or other object on the page), and instructs the site to drop a tracking cookie onto your machine. Audience measurement
companies use these cookies for counting. Web Analytics providers use them to provide KPIs. Targeting companies use them to encode targeting attributes about you that help advertisers deliver better-targeted ads to your screen. Together, these requests for content elements ("tag
requests") and cookies form the backbone of what we call census, or site-centric, measurement.
Let's take a step back and make this tangible. Please be our guest at the
comScore home page by clicking here. Are you there yet? Good. Can we offer you a cold drink? Now, with your cursor on the page, right
click (you Apple people are on your own) and select "view source code." That'll open up a new window on top of the home page. Now, see all that gobbledy-gook in the new
window? That's the code that tells your computer how to assemble and display the page for you. Scroll down to lines 1068 through 1085. That particular chunk of gobbledy-gook is
the comScore tag, which instructs the website to tell the comScore counting server that you've requested the page, and also tells the site to drop a comScore cookie-- which we'll recognize
when you request another page, and also if you come back tomorrow-- unless it's gone, in which case you'll get another. (Unless you block or reject cookies. But you're reading the
Metrics Insider, so you probably don't.)
In all, we've got four tracking tags on our site. Chances are, if you work at a publisher, you have way more tags than that on your
site. You're probably working with ad servers, RTB platforms, networks, and exchanges. Over the past several years there has been an explosion in tagging. The data that is created,
stored, mined, tracked, and deployed by these tag-based solutions is helping publishers monetize their audiences. It is helping advertisers reach their audiences more effectively and
efficiently. And, it is even enhancing the consumer experience with the web. It's kind of a triple-win scenario.
But everything has a price. Publishers are concerned
that tag ubiquity has the potential to affect site performance (the more things that have to happen when the user requests a page, the longer it takes that page to load, and each set of tags firing
constitutes another thing happening). In addition, the time and effort required to manage these different tagging implementations can create a material demand on publisher resources.
At the IAB Research Council meeting last month, when the topic of tagging came up, the top researcher at one leading web publisher commented that the analysts in his department were spending up to 30%
of their time on tagging implementation issues. Another publisher researcher commented that she was spending 25% of her time on such implementation issues.
So over the past couple of
years, the idea has been buzzing around that perhaps there should be one single, central tagging repository -- one single set of tags that every publisher could use, that would track all the data
necessary for every third-party solution provider (audience measurement, web analytics, network, ad server, exchange.) In fact, at that IAB Research Council meeting, the notion of the
centralized, universal tag was on the agenda.
It's a theoretically appealing idea, but I think there are some very good reasons to argue against it. One is the question of whether
all the data that every third party requires could in fact be encoded into a single set of cookies (I'm assuming a central tagging warehouse would also involve a centralized cookie). Beyond
feasibility questions, there are privacy questions (just how much data about a consumer should we be embedding into a single, essentially open-source cookie)? And too, I find myself concerned
about the notion of a single point of failure; what happens if that tagging clearinghouse goes down for a couple of days?
But the publisher pain points about site latency and labor costs are
legitimate. So the question becomes, given these real pain points, is a single universal tag the appropriate solution? Or are there other alternatives?
I think perhaps there are.
Tag ubiquity has spawned a new service category, called Tag Management Solutions (or TMS.) As Eric Peterson (who, full disclosure, works with one of the TMS providers, Ensighten) put it, TMS is "a ‘one stop shop' able to manage any number of
tag-based technologies via a single user interface."
I'm aware of three players in this space (if your company is a fourth, say so in the comments to this piece): Ensighten; Tagman; and Tealium. To be clear, I don't have any sort of
preference, recommendation, or endorsement for one or the other of these solutions. I'm not even saying you need one. And from a company perspective, since comScore is providing more and
more applications that incorporate tagging, our philosophy is to be TMS-agnostic.
But I do think -- and the people who know way more about this than I do, and with whom I consulted after
that IAB Research meeting, seem to agree (hey, Jodi!) -- that the notion of a single, centrally administered source for all tagging is probably the wrong solution to the pain points created by the
explosion in tagging. The good news though, as is often the case in the digital world, is that where technology unfettered creates a problem, more technological innovation solves it.