Hundreds of marketing technologies, thousands of tags - effective tag management requires more than just an enterprise tag management solution. In this post, I present you my 10 commandments for effective tag management. I think these 10 simple rules are quite obvious and useful for anyone interested in implementing a more robust and effective tagging regime.
Convention over configuration
- Choose a data layer convention
- Develop a tagging style guide
- Fat data layer skinny tags
Pattern Physiology and Pathology
- Don’t repeat yourself
- Simplicity before generality, use before reuse
- Simplify essential complexity; diminish accidental complexity
Pay down your tagging debt
- Tagging debts are like open shoelaces - disaster waiting to happen
- Shortcuts now are paid back with interest later
Tagging is about balancing
- Good tagging requires balancing act between structure and latency.
- "Perfect" is the Enemy of "Good Enough"
- You can't future-proof solutions, today's solution is tomorrows problem
Focus on Tag Support and Maintenance
- Traceability, auditing and logging
- Always tag as if the guy who ends up maintaining your tag will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
In god we trust and all others we audit
- Control the data, not just the tag
- Change management and tag governance
- Understand the impact of change
Reliable and repeatable release process
- Version everything
- Deploy continuously
Everything will ultimately fail
- Automate actions, diagnostics, and processes
- Tag testing and monitoring as a first class citizen
- Perform regression, browsers are evil
Choose your weapons carefully, relinquish them reluctantly
- Tools you must love - Sublime Text, Github, Charles, Android Studio and TestFlight
- Debuggers are your best friends - Chrome Debugger, Firebug
Understand the business domain
- Chances are your biggest problem isn't technical
- Seek the value in requested capabilities
- Be pragmatic - business first resume later