Dependency Tracking as a best practice for tag management — Magic Pixel

Each page contains multiple web tags. Despite all your efforts, you will see one ridiculous error that points to unidentified data elements. This ruins your efforts and sometimes costs you heavy.

Each tag is dependent on new variables, new rules along with tag code. When code changes are made to a tag, the dependencies are not taken into consideration. Even if a tag manager is diligent about the tag dependencies, the structural complexities and poor practices do not allow to maintain a clean flow of the tag management process. A traditional Tag Management System approaches this problem by creating a directory before publishing to production. Each tag going through the same process defeats the purpose of these tags due to the time involved in publishing a tag.

Even small errors in the TMS implementation can make your website tags unmanageable. It is important to track the performance of each tag and the data elements that these tags depend upon.

Quick retrieval of tags and their dependencies provides a clear picture of what data your tags are collecting, how they are transmitting data to your Media providers, and which tags need to be updated.

Managing these tags, defining the variables, triggers, and implementing them using the right Tag Management System (TMS) are a few steps for tracking over a hundred tags seamlessly.

Magic Pixel is designed to automate this process of dependency tracking while managing tags. We have instances where we reduced the time spent on dependency tracking, drastically. The tool brought down and solved tag management issues in 8 hours which otherwise took over a month. With just a click, you can access and fix all dependencies of any tag in your system.

Once the tags are created, you’d want to understand whether they are configured properly. Verify that the data elements are being tracked as shown below.

You can track rules associated with a tag as shown here:

We recommend other best practices that can ease out your tag management. Follow this series of Tag management Best Practices.

What are data elements?

Originally published at https://magicpixel.io on December 31, 2020.