Creating a tagging plan: increasing business efficiency

The efficiency and stability of most modern businesses directly depends on how competent, comprehensive and well-developed their marketing strategies are. But here it is very important not only to think through a general plan and put it into action, but also to monitor the results, constantly, instantly responding to changes, adapting to current market trends and more. That is, an important task of any business promotion will be control over user actions and analysis of the information received.

To simplify such work, special marketing tags are often used in practice. They are embedded on the site to simplify tracking of user actions. But, as practice shows, there are often situations when specialists literally get lost in the chaos of incomprehensible tracking codes. Most often, such a situation occurs when several specialists work on websites. As a result, it turns out that in one part of the site there are no tags, while in another there are too many of them. It is unclear why this or that one is used, who implemented them, how relevant each of the codes is at the present time and whether they are needed at all in a particular case?

A well-written tagging plan helps to avoid all this chaos, but at the same time ensure high efficiency of tracking user actions on the site. This is the issue we will dwell on in detail in today's review. In particular, we will get to know in more detail what kind of work we are talking about at the moment. We will highlight a number of points indicating the need to use a tagging plan in practice. We will describe in detail step by step how to implement such an idea. We will list a number of mistakes that specialists most often make when performing this work. The information provided will allow you to independently develop a tagging plan that is as correct as possible for your site, taking into account its specifics, and also minimize potential problems in the process.

What is a tagging plan in marketing

A tagging plan is a truly strategic document in marketing that clearly describes how information about user actions on a site or in individual applications will be collected for subsequent evaluation of the audience's actions, determining their level of involvement, and evaluating the overall effectiveness of the work. This is a kind of scheme on the basis of which special tracking codes will be implemented on the site that can record user interactions with specific sites, pages, including clicks, views, and filling out feedback forms. The information collected here will be automatically transferred to analytics systems, including Google Analytics.

And one of the most important tasks at this stage is to determine what exactly needs to be tracked and how best to organize it all. As a result, marketing tags are placed as correctly as possible, which allows you to coordinate the measured data and the goals that the business is currently pursuing.

For the most part, the development of a tagging plan is carried out in close cooperation with business owners. That is, it is extremely important to have a person who thoroughly understands the specifics of the company's work, in particular, in such areas as:

• defining actions that require measurement and control;
• understanding key business tasks;
• assigning tags for precise and correct tracking of the necessary actions.

For the most part, the final tagging plan is a regular or spreadsheet that includes several tabs, sections, which describe in detail the various tracking components. Alternatively, these can be user actions, event triggers, data levels. The resulting document will also contain extremely useful information for teams involved in analytics. That is, thanks to it, you will have information at your disposal that will allow you to keep control of the business as a whole, identify errors and eliminate them as quickly as possible, thereby ensuring correct and accurate collection of information.

Creating a tagging plan is not included in the list of mandatory work for a business, but many marketers still recommend using it in practice. This will be especially relevant for cases when the latest relevant information about the company's work is taken into account at the stage of making new decisions. If you do not have such a plan, then there may be inconsistency in collecting information, which will negatively affect the results of the analysis and may lead to incorrect conclusions and wrong decisions. That is, it is important for you to regard the tagging plan as a kind of guideline that guarantees the most effective and systematic collection of information in accordance with the goals that your business is facing at a given time.

Why it is worth creating a tagging plan: key points

Tags are used everywhere in marketing today, because this is the only way to keep the effectiveness of business promotion under full control, instantly respond to external challenges, changes, and improve the effectiveness of developed strategies. And here it is very important to avoid chaos, to ensure the most clear and consistent collection of data in those elements of the site, applications where it is really necessary. You will be able to cope with these tasks as efficiently as possible if you have a properly drawn up tagging plan at your disposal. Here are just a few of the advantages that the implementation of this solution in the company's work processes guarantees:

1. Focus on business goals. The tagging plan is one of the key elements in ensuring the most effective and targeted collection of information on online platforms, be it sites, various services, applications. At the output, you will have a structured document that clearly demonstrates the main tasks and indicates which elements need to be tracked in order to achieve the set goals. That is, thanks to such a plan, your approach to launching marketing tags will be as conscious and consistent as possible. This is what will allow you to avoid thoughtlessly adding random tracking codes to your pages. That is, you will be able to see the priority metrics that can significantly help in achieving the desired results.
2. More efficient data management. By standardizing the rules, names of definitions, events, you will be able to build more efficient control over information. Thanks to the plan's consistency, you will be able to collect truly accurate, clear and reliable information. The risk of errors that can have a negative impact on the integrity of information, such as duplication of events, incorrect attribution of conversion actions, is minimized. The information received will be as simple and easy for you to interpret, literally at a visual level. This is what will ultimately allow you to make balanced and informed decisions. If all those specialists who work on your site and business as a whole comply with uniform tracking rules, then at the output you will receive truly accurate data. That is, you receive information suitable for subsequent use without additional transformations, modifications.
3. Formation of a centralized data source. Tagging plan — This is a single source of information for absolutely all specialists who work in the field of analytics and digital marketing of your company. Having such information, your employees will be able to better coordinate their work and make the most balanced and correct decisions based on a common reliable document. All those who work on product development, marketing, and data analysis will benefit from such a solution. The information contained in this document will help literally in real time to update and improve tracking methods, as well as adapt to new business challenges as quickly as possible.
4. Transforming collected information into logical analytical conclusions. A tagging plan gives you the opportunity to turn disparate information into information that will significantly help in the development of your business as a whole. You will be able to extract information from the received data that will be extremely useful for subsequent analysis. This is what turns your business goals into data that can be measured, and based on them, you can evaluate the effectiveness of launched marketing strategies, make adjustments to them if there is no need, thereby increasing the return on investment. It will not be possible to achieve all this without a clear structuring of actions, which is fraught with making wrong decisions, limiting the potential for development.

To make it easier to assess the potential benefit of using a tagging plan, we will give a simple example. Let's imagine that we are talking about SaaS business, which has a fairly rapid growth in organic traffic, but at the same time you see that the number of trial subscriptions, registration of new accounts remains at the original level. If you look at this issue without detailed elaboration, it may seem that the launched strategy works, and at the output we get an increase in traffic. But if you use the tagging plan, you will be able to track the event as accurately as possible and see that visitors to your site are not converted into leads. And this happens because the information presented on the site does not correspond to the interests of the target audience. That is, now you see the problem in the launched marketing strategy, you understand what its cause is and you will be able to make the necessary adjustments, which will allow you to subsequently attract the right clients, those who will allow you to achieve your business goals.

If you analyze the information provided, you can conclude that creating a tagging plan will be useful for a fairly wide range of specialists, including marketers, data analysts, web developers, project managers. With its help, teams will be able to understand what data is best to track and how to implement it as correctly as possible. As a result, well-coordinated cooperation is formed with coordinated and consistent actions, which has a positive impact on the development of the business as a whole.

If you work in the digital marketing or analytics niche, then seriously consider developing a tagging plan. This is what will allow you to optimize business processes and ensure the receipt of high-quality data for subsequent analysis. But here everything must be implemented as correctly as possible. And now we will tell you how to do it.

Creating a tagging plan: step-by-step instructions

Developing a tagging plan is a fairly complex undertaking, which involves taking into account a large number of different factors. But if you approach these works consciously, if you understand how to implement everything correctly, then for the most part no difficulties or problems should arise. Now we will tell you how to do these works correctly and simply. We have conditionally divided them all into 5 main stages, each of which we will now consider in maximum detail. Our instructions for creating a tagging plan will help you to do the upcoming work yourself and correctly.

Stage 1: Define goals and performance indicators

The first stage of developing a tagging plan is far from technical nuances. Initially, it is important to correctly define goals and place emphasis. To do this, you need to understand what role your site, service, application plays in principle, what you want to get from it in the end. That is, this is how we define the main parameters, as well as those performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used directly in the course of analytics, evaluating the results obtained.

Now it is important for you to understand which business goal is relevant for you: increasing conversion, increasing the customer life cycle, increasing retention rates, etc. Now, for each of the defined goals, select the most relevant performance indicators. As an option, this could be:

1. CR, that is, the conversion rate. It displays the percentage of users who perform certain target actions on your site, whether it is registration, contacting managers, placing orders, purchasing, etc.
2. CRR, that is, the customer retention rate. Displays the number of users who will return to your site again during the period of time you set. This parameter indicates loyalty on the part of the target audience.
3. LTV, that is, the customer life cycle. Indicates what total income you expect to receive from one client throughout the entire period of time when he will interact with your business.

Once you link KPIs to the goals and objectives that you set for your business, you will be able to form a targeted approach to tracking the main characteristics. This is what will allow you to subsequently track truly correct information and make informed decisions based on it that can benefit your business.

Stage 2: choosing the right tools

Choosing the tools that will subsequently be used to collect and analyze information is one of the important stages in terms of tagging. The correctness of the work performed will determine how effectively and correctly the information you need will be collected, and how correctly it will be analyzed. Thus, many modern platforms have a large number of functions tailored specifically for certain metrics. And here it is important for you to decide which of these options will best meet the goals set at the previous stage. So, from the main tools that are often used by modern marketers, we will highlight:

1. Google Analytics 4. One of the most popular tools for tracking the behavior of the user audience of the most visited pages, traffic.
2. Heat maps. Here we can highlight such tools as Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity. With their help, specialists visualize the process of interaction between the target audience and the site, identify points of contact. Session recording is also provided here.
3. Meta Pixel. This solution is widely used at the stage of retargeting visitors to social networks, including Facebook and Instagram. It is able to collect information about user actions and structure it.
4. Google Tag Manager (GTM). A platform that can significantly simplify the entire process of tag management. There are plenty of opportunities to add and edit them without directly interfering with the code of your resource.
5. Advertising platforms. Most modern advertising networks are equipped with additional functionality in the form of tracking pixels. With their help, you can significantly simplify the collection of information and take the right actions at the stage of optimizing advertising campaigns, which will increase their effectiveness.

You can use one of these tools, as well as combine them all, thereby providing a comprehensive approach to getting to know user activity, from their behavior on the site to control over conversion rates.

Stage 3: Developing a tagging plan

At this point, you have already defined the main business goals, metrics to track, and selected the tools that will help implement your idea. Now you can proceed directly to drawing up a sequence of actions. That is, now we are already talking about developing a tagging plan. Subsequently, it will be the basis for tracking user interactions with your site. Among its main components, it is worth highlighting:

• Goal/KPI. Here, it is important to link each marketing tag to business goals and the metrics that need to be tracked, as well as to the tool itself. That is, it is important for you to indicate here which platform will collect information, process it, and analyze it.
• The name of each event and its description. You should prepare concise information on each activity being tracked. This is what will allow you to easily identify it later/
• Page type and its URL. Here it is important for you to specify in the table the section and the specific page where the tracked event will occur.
• Detailed information on each tag. Here you need to specify the name of the tags that you plan to use, their triggers and variables. This is what will ensure uniform management of the entire tracking process.
• Responsible persons and task status. Specify the team members who will be responsible for working with each tag. Do not forget to update the status of your plan implementation with a certain regularity.

As a result, you get a structured approach that increases the accuracy of tracking, significantly speeds up and simplifies the work associated with scaling and adjusting tags directly in the course of business development. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that when working with the Google Analytics tool, it is extremely important to ensure that the event names correspond to the rules and names that are in effect on the site. You must check that there are no reserved prefixes or names. This is what will help avoid conflicts in the tool's operation and the collection of incorrect information.

Today, there are many ready-made tagging plan templates freely available on the Internet. You can take any of them as a basis, and then make certain adjustments based on the specifics of your own business. You can remove irrelevant options from them and add those that are needed at the moment. First of all, you should pay special attention to defining your goals, because this is the only way to move in the right direction.

Stage 4: Implementing a tagging plan

Now that you already have a compiled tagging plan, you need to start implementing marketing tags. Here, special management tools will provide you with significant assistance, such as the same Google Tag Manager. Its main convenience is that it allows you to centralize absolutely all tags in one simple and intuitive interface. This is what will save you from having to manually edit the code on the site.

Tags are implemented in the following sequence:

1. Adding tags. Here you will need to create your own separate tag for scheduled events directly in the Google Tag Manager tool.
2. Configuring triggers. At this stage, we bind triggers to each tag for operation. That is, it is important for you to show under what conditions the system will understand that your tag has been triggered. As an option, this could be clicking on a certain button, loading a page, entering information in an application form, etc.
3. Checking tags for correctness. Here it is important for us to use the built-in preview mode, which is already built into the basic version of Google Tag Manager. This way you can make sure that the tags you specified are triggered correctly and in real time.
4. Publish your tags. Now that you are sure that they are working correctly, they need to be published. And by doing so you activate the tags on the site.

A small tip: use the version control option built into Google Tag Manager. With its help, you will be able to document all the updates that occur, which will greatly simplify change control and help maintain consistency of all actions.

We also want to draw your attention to the importance of complying with the requirements of global regulations, including GDPR, CCPA. This means that you must have consent from users to collect and process their personal information, including the use of cookies. That is, until you receive the appropriate consent, you cannot activate tags intended for the processing of personal data. Also, the privacy policy is mandatory to be updated in accordance with the specified requirements. This is what guarantees transparency in the collection of information, as well as its subsequent use.

Step 5: Test and maintain tagging plans

Now that your tagging plans are implemented, you need to make it a habit to regularly check and test your tags. This is what will ensure increased accuracy of the information collected. The fact is that frequent testing allows you to get the most clear and accurate picture in the end. This is especially important after work that involves updating the site. There is always a chance that new changes, options, functions can affect the correct operation of tags.

The following recommendations will help to significantly speed up and simplify this work:

• Write down a plan for regular checks for yourself. As part of such activities, you will periodically review all the tags used, making sure that they have not lost their relevance and correspond to your business goals.
• From time to time, check the correct operation of tags that are of particular importance to your business. Google Tag Assistant can be used as a reliable assistant here.
• If non-working tags are detected, you need to fix the errors as soon as possible. Everything that is inactive, that has lost its relevance, that is associated with errors, should be updated, replaced as quickly as possible, or else deleted.
• Review the list of used tags from time to time, as well as their settings. As the business operates, situations often arise when goals and even directions change. It is important for you to make the necessary adjustments in a timely manner.

These are the activities that will allow you to maintain the constant relevance of your tagging plan, guaranteeing the reliability and accuracy of information, allowing different specialists and teams to adapt to changing requirements. As a result, you get a truly valuable and long-term asset for the effective development of the business as a whole.

Main mistakes in marketing tagging

When developing the concept of marketing tagging and the plan itself, specialists quite often make certain mistakes that have a negative impact on the accuracy of the results obtained. So, the most common problems here include:

• Lack of clearly defined goals. If you do not understand what goal your business is currently facing, you will not be able to correctly select the appropriate indicators for monitoring and set up tags for them. As a result, excessive or irrelevant markup is often allowed.
• Complication of the tagging plan. In practice, there are often cases when specialists add a huge number of tags to the list, prescribe complex conditions for them to trigger. This is what can confuse users and have a negative impact on the collection of information.
• Inconsistency in tag names. We have already indicated the importance of this point in the review. So, if you do not listen to such recommendations, if you do not follow the standards in the names of the tags themselves, triggers for them and variables for tracking, then confusion will arise, the information will look chaotic, you will not be able to analyze it correctly.
• Not all stakeholders participate in the development of the tagging plan and subsequent control over its implementation. If it happens that important team members are excluded from this process, then so-called bottlenecks will appear, there will be inconsistency of goals, problems with tracking, etc.
• Neglect of testing and subsequent support. We have already pointed out that it is the regular verification of the correctness of the tags, their timely updating - this is the key to obtaining the most accurate and correct information. Otherwise, you risk losing important insights, making mistakes at the stage of making strategically important decisions for the business.

Knowing all these weak points, you will be able to choose the most effective ways to avoid them directly in the context of your company's work. As a result, you will get a truly high-quality and reliable tagging plan that guarantees maximum return on the collected data and the effectiveness of work in practice.

Let's summarize

A tagging plan is a comprehensive strategy aimed at regularly tracking user activity data on various digital platforms, collecting it for subsequent analysis. By and large, its development will be useful for most modern businesses. Due to the fact that you set clear goals, coordinate analytics and upcoming tasks, implement standardized tracking methods, you will be able to receive the most accurate data at the output, which will become the basis for developing subsequent strategies. Such a plan will ensure excellent transparency and order in teamwork, will allow you to easily adapt to market changes and maintain data integrity, regardless of what digital channels are in question.

To get a truly effective and working tagging plan, you need to implement several simple steps:

• define the main business goals and performance indicators that should be tracked;
• select the tools that will be used in the work;
• develop the tagging strategy itself, laying it out in a list;
• implement the compiled plan, introducing all the necessary tags on the pages of your resource;
• after testing, launch the plan into operation, regularly check it and update it as needed, increasing efficiency and adapting it to the realities of the market.

We described in detail how to implement all these stages in today's review, so you will not have problems with their implementation. The only possible difficulty is the unavailability of a number of tools that you need to organize your work. The fact is that some of them are blocked in certain regions and countries at the legislative level. But now you have the opportunity to effectively bypass restrictions by using mobile proxies MobileProxy.Space. They will provide effective substitution of your real IP address and GEO with your own technical data. You will be able to choose the most suitable geolocation for yourself in order to effectively bypass existing restrictions.

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