Ah, marketing pixels, those simple little JavaScript snippets that your marketing team gives you the night before a new campaign is supposed to launch. The ones that always work perfectly out of the box, never require customization, and always come with a clearly defined retirement date. Exactly those.

Not having tight control over those tiny little scripts in your tag management system can cause huge headaches, including privacy and regulatory compliance liability, broken conversion tracking, site performance issues, downstream retargeting failures, and security risks.

When was the last time you thought about them? How many of them are sitting in your tag management system right now? How many of them are broken because the event they depended on was changed months ago? Or worse, how many of them are still silently sending customer information to a third party with whom you no longer have an agreement in force?

Admit it, you’re just like almost all the marketing technology teams out there, you have no idea. Does your CISO know this? How about Legal? We understand. Analytics and MarTech are rarely in the forefront of teams’ planning. You love the idea of governance, but your team is always spending so much time dealing with last-minute requests like these, making sure new functionality is covered, and running ad hoc reporting analyses that it never happens.

But it matters. A lot. Not having tight control over those tiny little scripts in your tag management system can cause huge headaches, including privacy and regulatory compliance liability, broken conversion tracking, site performance issues, downstream retargeting failures, and security risks.

These tags often collect customer and behavioral data, whether they’re being actively provided or not. Lack of governance can expose organizations to violations of constantly evolving regulations, including HIPAA, CCPA, GDPR, and numerous others that are enacted each year. Not knowing what is being collected and where it’s going can, at best, lead to a fire drill when your organization is accused of infringing on this legislation, and, at worst, lead to actual penalties.

Most major e-commerce organizations rely heavily on third-party advertising and marketplace platforms to drive revenue. Broken conversion tracking causes a nightmare to reconcile, which erodes trust with both the retailer and the platform, and makes marketing spend attribution that much harder to determine.

It’s well documented that slower page load times negatively affect site conversions and SEO rankings. Industry studies show that a single second delay can reduce conversions by up to 20%. Too many, poorly configured, or broken tags can demonstrably cause slower page load times, leaving your team a prime scapegoat for the sales team’s failure to meet their quarterly goals.

Finally, these tags are designed to allow 3rd parties to run code on your site without involving your engineering teams. This means they can download other scripts or perform other functions you may be completely unaware of. Your legal department will love hearing this reinforced when they ask for a list of everything that is being served on the site and what they are doing.

A good governance system alleviates these risks by making sure organizations have a registry that, at a minimum, tracks:

  • Tag inventory and documentation
  • What is being tracked
  • How long it is tracked for
  • Where the data goes
  • Data layer standards
  • Quality engineering procedures

But even a good governance system is only effective if it’s accurate. It’s also critical to periodically audit your tag management ecosystem to ensure that these procedures are being followed. Not sure where to start? It’s understandable. Looking at an overgrown garden is always daunting. We can help you take the first step by conducting an audit of your current state and creating a good governance program to keep you running smoothly. We can even handle your entire tag workflow, so your team can focus on other priorities.