1 year ago
Dounia Albichari
Have you ever taken over a client and needed an entire week to make sense of the website tagging? Or wondered why a specific tag was implemented? Why a certain button isn’t tagged? What a certain tag does? If you still need it? If you even created it?
I know you have, we all have. And that is why you should always have a tagging plan at the ready.
A tagging plan will make your work, your colleagues’ work, and all parties involved with the website’s work about a hundred times easier. With a tagging plan on hand you’ll have all the information you need in one centralized place. Any updates are easy to follow-up and any changes will be logged. When the time comes to update the website, change funnel tracking, switch the client to a new manager, you’ll have virtually no work as everything is well documented and up to date.
In this article we’ll go over the contents and set-up of a tagging plan, the business impact of having or not having one and how to use it.
A tagging plan can have any format you like, but we opt for an excel document that includes all information about the tracking and tagging of a certain website. You’ll find different tabs which describe in detail how the tracking is set up and why it is done this way. A tagging plan allows you to have an overview of the tracking and how this is connected to the goals of the corresponding website.
As previously mentioned, the tagging plan will facilitate different tasks for all parties involved with the creation, set-up and follow-up of a website. This ranges from the website owner, the web developers (back-end and front-end) to the analytics teams or even media agencies.
With the creation and correct updates of a tagging plan, this document will allow for an overview of different aspects regarding your (client’s) website. You’ll be able to easily:
A tagging plan is not only useful for the expert in question, but is also a crucial step to create an effective tracking strategy. Oftentimes the tracking strategy of a website is overlooked or comes as an afterthought. Advertisers easily skip the tagging plan step and dive straight into the actual tagging implementation. However, without a plan in place, it would be quite difficult to create a coherent business goal driven tracking set-up.
Taking the extra step of creating and properly reflecting on a tagging plan will allow for a set-up that makes sense, tracks the correct information and doesn’t track useless information. As we’ve all experienced, tracking too much data can be as cumbersome as tracking too little. Furthermore, it will make for a flexible tracking set-up that lasts and doesn’t have to be recreated every 2 months.
TLDR: No tagging plan → no proper tracking → random data → skewed results and business decisions.
A tagging plan can have any format you’d like. The only requirements are:
Let’s go over our Clicktrust tagging template’s different sections and what should be included in each of them.
We use a spreadsheet with different tabs and links to have a clear document structure. Feel free to add comments and notes to make sure all viewers of this document understand what is meant.
If you don’t want to go through the process of creating your own tagging plan, we’ve created a freebie for you based on our very own Clicktrust tagging template. Fill out your details below to receive it directly in your inbox.
Hopefully you already have one version or another of a tagging plan set-up, and if not, this is your chance to take a look at your entire set-up and do a deep-clean. Make sure to log everything right now and you’ll be all set for the future. Have fun tagging!