Tag management systems have been around for years and there are several different types. Some are provided by analytics vendors (Adobe Launch, Google Tag Manager), and others are independent (Tealium, Ensighten). Most organizations deploy their digital analytics tags via some sort of tag management system.
They’re a lot of work. While tag management systems definitely simplify the process around managing analytics and marketing tags, the actual process of configuring your tag management system requires you to:
Most tag management implementations are built from scratch and prone to error. Organizations generally create a tag management configuration that has never been done before. Of course, when you do things manually, there is always a risk that mistakes can be made whenever changes or updates are made.
Apollo allows you, for the first time, to automate the process of tag management configuration.
The key inputs of the tag management system are the data layer and tag management events, data elements, and analytics tool variables. All of these items are already contained within Apollo, so all that is needed is a mechanism to automate the tag management configuration. This can be done via Apollo.
Here’s an example of a data layer and tagging specifications dynamically generated after selecting business requirements:
Once the data layer and tagging specifications are defined, the next step is to assign each data element to an analytics tool variable. In the case of an Adobe Analytics implementation, that might mean assigning Site Country and Site Type to eVars.
At this point, the Analytics Management System knows that there is a Page Load Started data layer event that needs to be triggered and when that happens, eVar1 and eVar2 should be populated with the Site Country and Site Type respectively. If the organization is using the Adobe Launch tag management system (which comes free with Adobe Analytics), Apollo can leverage the Adobe Launch API to automatically create and configure an Adobe Launch property.
As you can see here, the creation of the tag management configuration is done in a matter of seconds instead of taking days or weeks. This would be the case whether there were just a few rules and elements like in this example or if there were hundreds in a more robust analytics implementation.
