The Anatomy of a Great Marketing Tag With Examples

It is important to understand what a marketing tag is before we can start discussing examples of marketing tags.

Marketing tag is an innovation that has been of great help and has enabled marketers to optimize ads they produce and to change the ad content as well.

These ads are important for marketing because they can be sent to clients as well as managing partners in advertising and marketing firms.

What is a Tag?

A tag is a shortcode written in JavaScript that does a specific action on your website. Marketing tags usually collect information about a website visitor and how they behaved on the site.

The data collected is then sent back to the respective marketing platform for processing and reporting.

Types of Marketing Tags

Tags are divided into two, functional tags and technical tags.

Types of functional tags

Conversion Tags

This is a marketing tag used to track the performance of an ad campaign. When a user clicks on an ad and then lands on your website, you can connect a conversion tag to a specific page and once the page is licked on a conversion tag is loaded.

The ad server will detect where the click came from and thus you will know that the specific ad triggered a conversion.

The server will use the information gathered from these tags to automatically optimize the ads that are performing well

Remarketing Tags

This marketing tag is used to change an ad’s content and target users. They capture data onsite and then send it to the ad server.

These types of tags allow you to change the content of your ads based on the behavior of your consumers. These tags enable you to invest more of your funds on users that are interested.

You can do this by either only targeting that specific subset of users or by increasing your bid in the event that a user visits a specific section of your website.

Remarketing tags can also be subdivided into two types:

Simple Tags

Here you will be required to create a tag for the action you want to use for your remarketing strategy.

The system is the one that generates the tag that you will have to place when that specific action occurs.

Everything will depend on how you place the tags as the system doesn’t know what they do and the labels are what will enable you to know.

Smart Tags

In this case, the system will give you a general tag that can be used on all pages. The system allows you to choose the pages you want to use for retargeting and they usually allow for extra tracking options for purchases and click interactions.

The system is the one that determines the logic and all you have to do is to send data to the system. The targeting rules will be decided later on.

Types of technical tags

There are two types of technical tags:

Script Tag

This is a script often written in JavaScript and it is inserted into a website so as to share data with the ad server.

Image Tag

This is a small image which is usually 1*1 pixels that are loaded onto a website so as to share data with an ad server.

The difference between the two is that an image tag is static but a script tag is not. The content found in a script tag can always change and thus change the type of data it is tracking as well.

How do Users get Identified?

In order to use user data for remarketing or to link an ad click to a conversion, the user has to be identified by the server first.

There are a number of ways in which this task can be achieved such as:

Logins

Platforms such as Google, Facebook and Instagram have over one billion users who are logged in which supplies them with data that they can attribute the conversions to their ads.

The advantage of this is that they can attribute these logins across all devices that the user is logged in from.

Fingerprinting

The ad server, in this case, will collect a number of device data which is often based on machine and browser settings and then combines this data to an identifier.

Whenever a conversion occurs, the system will check whether the conversion was triggered by the same set of device data.

Cookies

Mobile and desktop web identify users based on cookies. The users get a cookie on the domain of the ad server whenever they see an ad and each time they click an ad it is attributed to the cookie.

The conversion tag is also linked to the same cookie as it is also hosted on the same domain. This will allow the ad server to check whether or not the user clicked on the ad.

Device IDs

When it comes to applications, cookies will not really be effective. This is because users are usually sent from one app to another.

In order for the ad server to attribute a conversion or remarketing data to a specific app on mobile, it needs to get a device ID. These IDs are unique for every phone.

How does a Marketing Tag Work?

When a user pulls up a webpage he/she initiates page load. The browser will then read the source code of the page loaded.

The source code is the one which contains the various tags. Once the browser reads the part of the source code with the tag it executes/fires.

Once the tag is fired the function it was created for is executed. Most tags usually send tracking information.

The information a marketing tag captures include user information, page information, and URL information. The data captured by the tag is then sent to a third party where it is processed and recorded.

Properly implementing tags and giving them proper functions is the basis for all web analytic, downstream big data analysis, media campaign measurements and performance of advertising and marketing efforts.

In Conclusion…

A marketing tag is very important when it comes to tracking how your ad campaigns are performing. They can be implemented on any page on your website but you have to specify the action that you want it to take.

A marketing tag is created using SEO tools. Lander has the best SEO tools on the market and an amazing team that will be willing to help you through the process of creating and installing tags for your website.

Proper structuring and of a marketing tag will be the foundation of everything else you do in your digital marketing and advertising.

As a marketing professional, you should really start considering how well your tags have been structured and where you have placed them depending on the function that you would like them to serve.

The examples of marketing tags that we have given you should give you a clear picture of what tags are and how they function.

Marketing tags will enable you to optimize your campaigns automatically, change your ad content and target users.

The information provided here will enable you to know where to look in the event that you are having data issues with your tags.

Thank you for taking the time to read.