Last month, TagMan, a provider of tag management applications, secured $5 million in its second round of venture capital funding. Digital media investment firms Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital led the Series B round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to the $10 million mark.

TagMan, not surprisingly, attributed the successful round to the growing need for its brand of analytics. "Data-driven online marketing is growing exponentially and tag management is the enabling technology that allows companies to unlock their data,” said Paul Cook, CEO and founder of TagMan, at the funding’s announcement.

Cook is correct in that universal tags, which manage online third party vendor tags and the data they provide, can be more efficient compared to the status quo–that is, managing an ever-growing collection of individual scripts.

Increasingly companies are asking themselves if they should make the switch to a universal tag, even and especially, by smaller firms that find themselves balancing several tags from an ad server, a CMS, an e-commerce platform, and usually several web analytics applications.

It is easy to make a mistake updating or changing or adding tags, and thus lose hours or days of time, not to mention valuable data.

However, this space is still emerging, which means evaluating vendors requires extra careful due diligence. There is also a possibility that future government regulations could impact this tech area, especially as Congress eyes behavioral and other tracking activities.

Basic Questions to Ask a Vendor

There are also implementation issues to consider–issues that must be addressed in-depth by the vendors. Questions a potential customer might want to ask include:

• How do I test to make sure that a tag change works properly when deployed via the universal tag? This is crucial as tag changes can be frequent.

• Can I use the troubleshooting tools that come with such applications such as Google Analytics, Omniture or DFP? Or do testing tools come with the universal tag?

• Is the impact on perceived page load speed really measurable and if yes, what's the typical impact?

• In case I am not satisfied with your services or product, is there an easy to roll back and go back to using several tags, or switch to another tag system?

Emerging Best Practices

Much also depends on the company, first as it prepares for implementation and then, of course, as it manages its systems. The prep work is the same for any IT endeavor—starting with making sure that operational, financial, and technical goals and objectives are on the same page.

Also, make sure that management in each of these areas are committed, or at least are not against, the project.

It is also important to have the right implementing team in place–a team whose skill set is heavy on organization rather than code-writing. That are necessary too, but not so much at this level.

Make sure there is agreement on the benchmarks hoped to be achieved. These could be anything from better tracking of conversions to the ability to make changes to a campaign in real time.

Integrate, as much as possible, tags into publishing and content management workflows, offers Infinitive Analytics in a post on this subject. "It is all about avoiding the human error factor." At the same time, i also said, limit or consolidate the number of publishing systems used for producing content.