Online Tag Management Plagues Marketers

In a recent study of online advertising executives, TagMan, a online ad tag management, found almost all (99%) faced problems with ad pixel/tag implementation and management. Nearly nine in ten (86%) of respondents have had tags implemented incorrectly on the sites they manage and three quarters (75%) had seen delays in the implementation of tags due to website development cycles.

The implications of tag management issues among respondents included loss of campaign performance data (65%), delays in launch of a new campaign (63%), delays in use of a new marketing technology (58%), loss of website traffic (31%), loss of website sales (28%). Only 1% said they never faced tag management issues.

Almost a quarter (23%) of client and agency respondents spend more than $10 million per year on marketing technologies and services that rely on site tags but over a quarter did not know how much they spent on IT resource to implement tags.

In a quote released with the study, TagMan CEO Paul Cook said, "Unless you are in the IT department, there is a tendency to gloss over the problems of ad tag implementation and management, taking for granted that somehow ad tags are easily added or taken away without cost or consequence, but as our study shows, there are huge costs and potentially significant loss of revenue from poorly managed ad tags."

Nearly a third (30%) of respondents said it took a week to implement a new tag on the websites they managed. Nearly a quarter (24%) said the person responsible for tag implementation spent one to two days per month on the task. In more than half of cases (52%), tagging sits outside the control of marketers.