#049: The Future of Tag Management

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:04.00 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Tim, Michael, and the occasional guests discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And no, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:24.87 [Michael Helbling]: Hello everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 49. If you were in the digital analytics space in 2010, you probably started hearing about some crazy new tools that managed all the tags on your site. The ideas came from the long painful delays between site updates at large enterprises where new marketing and measurement technology is weighted to be launched. And so tag management was born. And back then we used to tell people you could do it all without writing a line of code. We were so young and naive. Fast forward to today and tag management is pretty standard. It’s part of almost any new implementation and everyone’s on board with the idea, but where do we go from here? And that’s what we’re talking about on this episode. Thanks to a listener, Michael Lee is also known as China Web Optimization on the measure slack. We wanted to talk about the future of tag management. Now, I know what you’re saying, to provide balance to my co-host Tim, hey Tim, And you’re extreme bias on these topics. We needed someone who is an expert, someone who has the respect of everyone in the TMS space. So we turned to the one and only Josh West. Josh is a senior partner at Analytics Demystified where he guides clients and thinking through tag management and custom development projects. And prior to that, he held senior technical implementation roles at Salesforce and consulted it on a trip before that. I also taught Tim how to make a faena pizza pie. Yes, he did. Welcome to the show, Josh.

00:02:02.50 [Josh West]: Hey, thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Good to chat with you guys for a little bit.

00:02:06.61 [Michael Helbling]: It is great. So I think what everyone’s dying to know right off the gate is, what is your favorite tag management tool and why? This gotcha journalism.

00:02:20.80 [Josh West]: Yeah, if you go back through the blog archives, you’ll find that one of the first blog posts I ever wrote at Demystified started an industry war. I had people from every company complaining to me that I had misrepresented or short-shifted them on there.

00:02:41.62 [Tim Wilson]: And lo, these many years later, you’ve almost recovered from that experience.

00:02:45.29 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, but thanks for bringing that up. No.

00:02:49.06 [Tim Wilson]: the link to that in the show notes.

00:02:51.19 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, let’s make sure.

00:02:55.11 [Michael Helbling]: I do actually remember that blog post and I remember some of the people in the building having the reactions they had to it and wondering, guys, you know that in a month or so, our tool is going to be owned by somebody else. Why are we getting so fired up about this blog post? But hey.

00:03:13.00 [Josh West]: Well, there’s actually a backstory to that post. So the reason that it caused so many problems, the reason was because I had that post sitting ready to write for two months. And we kept hearing rumblings about said acquisition. And I wasn’t sure how much I could say. So I wrote the post and then published it without a pretty decent chunk of it because it had been sitting there for two months. And I’m like, is this ever going to happen? Is it not going to happen? I had that material turned into a follow-up post the day after the acquisition was announced.

00:03:48.29 [Tim Wilson]: I feel like I will be, I may have a little to contribute to this episode, but just for anybody who doesn’t know exactly what we’re talking about, that was the satellite, the tag management platform created out of search discovery where Mr. Helbling works was then acquired by Adobe, just in case anybody is not following along with exactly what we’re referring to here.

00:04:07.82 [Michael Helbling]: Thank you, Tim. There’s my remedial translation. Yeah, Josh and I descended right into the jargon of the industry.

00:04:14.38 [Josh West]: Well, and that tag management system, again, for those of you who don’t know, is the one that is now referred to as Adobe DTM.

00:04:21.03 [Michael Helbling]: Or Adobe TDM. I’ve heard any number of names, but yeah.

00:04:24.59 [Tim Wilson]: Dynamic tag manager, because we don’t want a static tag manager. We want a dynamic tag manager.

00:04:29.20 [Michael Helbling]: And it’s actually not dynamic tag manager, it’s dynamic tag management for some reason.

00:04:34.23 [Tim Wilson]: See, I said to you guys we’re going to get over my head very, very quickly. But GTM is Google Tag Manager. Oh, so it’s not just one letter that’s different. It’s also a little of the suffix on the last word.

00:04:47.41 [Michael Helbling]: Exactly. Good show. Good show.

00:04:49.90 [Tim Wilson]: I’ve learned a lot.

00:04:50.92 [Michael Helbling]: Josh, thank you so much for being on.

00:04:54.48 [Michael Helbling]: We solved all the problems.

00:04:55.82 [Michael Helbling]: We have though. All right. But actually, so that is a really good question from Michael Lee and one that I think probably Josh, you spent a lot of time thinking about just in your work as a consultant. I know this is something that I spent a fair amount of time thinking about just because I’m trying to figure out Where are we all going with this but i’d love to get your perspective and sort of broad strokes sort of how do you see you know well actually maybe let’s lay some groundwork around how tag manager vendors have kind of. Proceeded to their life cycle and where they are all today because that may give some clues i don’t know do you want to maybe give a state of the state of the industry in broad terms.

00:05:35.65 [Josh West]: Yeah, sure. So we actually kind of got to the place that it took web analytics or digital analytics to get to probably in about half the time. The space moved really fast, and I think you can really trace it back to that acquisition. So once there were two free products that were in the market, It kind of changed the way I think some of the companies in the space were, you know, started actually thinking about their product. They all started kind of thinking of other ways that they could differentiate and make money because they were now in competition, not just with one free product, but two. And, you know, I think Google Tag Manager, you know, kind of started out as, you know, they mainly focused on Google Tags and, you know, really small, simple to implement tags. And then all of a sudden, when Adobe bought satellite, well, now there’s a tag management system that you can get for free that’s really sort of targeting the enterprise. And now GTM is really targeting the enterprise too, but at the time, I don’t know that I would say that was the case. So I mean, it kind of all goes back to that acquisition. And, you know, so what we’ve seen is that the tag management part, you know, I don’t want to say it’s become commoditized, but it sort of has. I think all of the tools are out there looking for other ways that they can kind of make money, that they can get their customers really hooked on their products and offer them some other things too. And I also think that it was such a unique challenge that we faced before tag management, that once there were some tools out there that could really make your life easier, everybody wanted one. They had to pay for it or not. So I think those two things kind of led us to reaching this point a lot faster than we’re 15 or so years into digital analytics. And I think most of the companies that I work with are either using Adobe analytics or Google analytics. There are lots of other tools out there, and we run into them from time to time. But those two have sort of cornered the market, I guess you would say. And tag management is getting there a lot faster. It’s definitely not going to take 15 years, I wouldn’t say, to hit that point.

00:07:48.43 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I think I see the history very similarly. I sort of view Google Tag Manager’s launch as sort of the validation of the tag management as a space back in 2012 when they launched in late 2012. And yeah, to your point, their early product was kind of a starting point and not necessarily competitive with sort of the premier vendors of that time. But then fast forward nine months with the acquisition of satellite and then things started moving really quickly. And, you know, Google Tag Manager to their credit has done a great job advancing that product. But yeah, I’ve also noticed that in the, what I’d say, sort of the initially pure play vendor space. So, you know, Signaltillium and Sighton, some of those, also in those years, pivots into additional products. Right to expand the product suite out past just the tag management tool, especially into what I’ll call sort of DMP land, you know, in terms of sort of we’re passing along all this data. Why don’t we hold on to it too and build something. And I know that’s a travesty of a way to talk about some of the products have built and certainly I have some fondness for a couple of them. So, but is that your, is that what you’ve seen too?

00:08:57.56 [Josh West]: Yeah, and I think in fact, I mean, I signal, I had somebody tell me there a few months ago, they don’t even consider themselves to be in the tag management space anymore.

00:09:06.57 [Michael Helbling]: Right.

00:09:07.61 [Josh West]: So they still have the product.

00:09:09.31 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that’s the starting product. But actually, they’d like to sell you their main product now, which is sort of as a company, they’ve kind of turned a corner away from being a tag management vendor. And I think but that is instructive or could potentially be instructive about then where the future is going, maybe. Maybe. What do you think, Tim?

00:09:31.01 [Tim Wilson]: Well, sometimes not being as deep in the space, I sometimes wonder if this is a little bit of a land grab of a painting the future. I think every technology vendor wants to sell you kind of their vision and buy the stuff that’s our vision. I feel like while I was trying to do a mental checklist of whether I’ve got any clients remaining who aren’t on a tag management platform, and I did come up with two, they’re smaller clients for me, large organizations, But the ones that are on it, even just doing the tag management, I feel like there’s still opportunity within those tag managers to actually really help it drive governance better. So I actually worry a little bit about, hey, we’re moving on to the next awesome thing because we have tag management implemented and we have our web analytics platform in place. But you know there was chatter seem like it was going around maybe six months to a year ago I think Rudy had some stuff on it about how hey you know implementing a tag manager is a great opportunity to take a look at your tag governance not just your web analytics tag all of your tags and I’ve got clients where Great, we’re now deploying media pixels through the tag manager. That has a lot of upsides, but guess what? We’re still not expiring them. We’re still bloating our site with too many media tags. I get the idea of the dream of this more centralized source of tracking and collecting visitors across different things. And I think I’m naturally kind of a laggard when it comes to this stuff. I’m like, I don’t know that I’ve really feel like we’ve hit the actual tag management out of the park.

00:11:10.78 [Josh West]: Well, to some extent, governance has gotten worse. I mean, I remember I kind of wrote a tag management system for salesforce.com. Because they get they kept complaining about page load time and our site slow and we’ve got tags that are in all of these different templates and so they I spent you know two months digging through every template on the website and you know ripping out the tags migrating him into this JavaScript library. And there were really only a handful of vendors that we were working with at that point. And once we had our homegrown tag management system, it was amazing how the advertising team started coming with a new vendor every week. Hey, let’s throw this tag up on the site. Because it’s all of a sudden, it’s easy. And just like you said, Tim, nobody ever says, oh, we’re done with this tag. So we keep adding, and adding, and adding, and never really removing the tags that we’re done with.

00:12:10.22 [Michael Helbling]: That’s a good point, Josh, in terms of once you start making it easier, suddenly the demand for additional tags starts to ramp up. But I think that’s part of what governance can enable. And obviously, there’s another part of governance, which is why do we have this in the first place? That’s got to be part of that equation, which TMS is in general and even homegrown systems don’t really address. No, the other governance tools out there have never really combined with tag management in a way I think that could kind of evidence sort of a bigger governance picture like Ghostry or ObservePoint and HubScan for scanning. Those could, somebody somewhere, could stick those together potentially and it would be very interesting I think. But today they kind of live in two separate realms, right? One is sort of like what’s out there, the other one is how do we put it out there. Anyways, let’s get back to tag management because governance, we’ve done that to death on this show.

00:13:06.13 [Tim Wilson]: Well, we did it once and that was enough for both of us.

00:13:09.27 [Michael Helbling]: Or at least we did it once with John Lovett. That was enough. Well, nobody likes to buy governance. It’s not sexy. Unlike tag management. Tag management is very sexy. It’s like, what tags you want to put on your website? Let’s go.

00:13:22.70 [Josh West]: Yeah, those first sales pitches were sexy and nothing else.

00:13:26.80 [Tim Wilson]: Yes that’s right man well let me let me ask it cuz Josh you said you kind of equating it to the ramp up in the curve for web analytics and how if you put web analytics at 15 years or whatever you want to call it there was a very very. definitive pivot in web analytics where the underlying infrastructure kind of pivoted from web logs and parsing web logs to page tag based stuff. Has there been from day one with tag man or inciting or whoever claims they were first has the basic underlying premise stayed exactly the same? Or have there been any kind of shifts where, wow, everybody was heading down this path and they all sort of decided, nope, we need to, and I don’t even know what that would be, asynchronous versus synchronous or something. Has that sort of shift happened or do you think it was just, it started out at a spot where it was kind of the laws of the internet were better understood. So it’s just kind of continuing to iterate on a better mousetrap from that initial jQuery in the DOM world.

00:14:28.26 [Josh West]: Well, I mean, I think the basic premise has sort of stayed the same. You know, we’re going to use a single JavaScript library to load tags. Though all of the vendors have sort of dipped their toes into, is there a better way to do this? Can we load these tags? You know, signal called at server direct and TUM calls it server to server. But there’s this idea that, hey, you know, is there a better way to load these tags? Could we instead just push this data up to our servers and then have our servers figure out where to send it? i don’t know that that’ll that’s not going to take on to catch on in its current iteration i don’t think just because you know the way that some of these tools work with identifying visitors and you know, their reliance on cookies makes it really hard. I mean, I think it could eventually be the future, but I think it’s probably going to take a couple of iterations and a little bit of a technology shift for us to actually get there.

00:15:23.31 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I agree with that. And it’s that thing, the limitation of how servers can communicate versus how front end technologies communicate. You just have a little bit more you can do on the front end than the back

00:15:35.61 [Josh West]: Yeah, if you’ve ever had a client or your employer try to set their tags up that way or even, you know, if you’re just using like Adobe’s data insertion API to push data up on the server, it’s always a little bit of a black box and testing it is kind of a pain. And it’s just, you know, I’m sure someday somebody will figure it out, but I think it’s going to take some time.

00:15:57.80 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and then to a certain extent, kind of the value proposition in terms of being a differentiator for that is kind of sailed. You know what I mean?

00:16:05.73 [Josh West]: Yeah.

00:16:06.29 [Michael Helbling]: Cause I don’t think like people are sitting through, well, maybe they are sitting through, you know, TMS RFPs where they’re considering like, Oh, well this one does server to server versus this one that’s just on the front. And maybe those conversations are still happening, but I’m, that’s not, um, that’s not our clients most for the most part.

00:16:25.21 [Josh West]: Yeah, I mean, I think if anything is going to drive that, it’s going to be mobile apps.

00:16:29.39 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, yeah. That’s one unsung piece, definitely.

00:16:33.20 [Josh West]: Because when you’re talking about the browser, pretty much wherever you’re using a web browser, your internet connection speed is good enough that if you load 20 little pixels on the page that you’re looking at, and some of those are getting cached, or at least the JavaScript used to generate them is getting cached, then performance-wise it’s not that big of a hit. When you start talking about being on a 4G connection somewhere, Wherever you might find yourself or if you’re on the subway and all of a sudden the connection drops and those tags need to be batched up and saved for when you come out from the underground. That’s a much more valid use case for it, I think. Not to mention the fact that I don’t know that any of the tag management vendors have really cornered the market on mobile tag management anyway. I think that mobile, if anything, drives that server-to-server communication is going to be mobile.

00:17:29.11 [Tim Wilson]: And is that weren’t just like, technologically, is that one where it’s a, it’s chasing what Apple and Google are like the nature of the apps that’s kind of cycling? And that feels like it’s been a little bit of a race to what can you do? What are you allowed to do and what can you do within apps? Is that still part of the challenge that that’s still sort of fluid and evolving? And so it’s not kind of as stabilized as traditional, the web, or is that not the issue?

00:17:55.23 [Josh West]: Yeah, I think the biggest problem with mobile is that a mobile app has to be compiled. So unless you build your mobile app using HTML5 and then you wrap it in a phone gap wrapper or something like that, unless you do something like that, then your native app is compiled. And anytime you release new functionality, it’s a new update to the app store. And it’s just a lot different. With JavaScript, with a website, it’s pretty easy to find something on the page you want to track. and hook some tracking up to it. Now, you might not have all the data you want, but you can implement stop gaps and quick fixes and things like that with pretty quick and dirty JavaScript. You really can’t do that with a mobile app. I mean, I think it might take some collaboration between Apple and Google and some of these vendors to kind of come up with something that works. And my guess is that Apple and Google are not going to be super thrilled about that type of collaboration.

00:18:56.30 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, but you know who’s really good at mobile phones is Samsung.

00:19:02.93 [Tim Wilson]: Winner is coming, so it’s good.

00:19:06.50 [Michael Helbling]: Throw an old Samsung on the fire. How are we going to start this fire in the middle of winter? Hold on. Let me take a call. Let me charge this phone. Well, that’s a secondary market for those then. That’s kindling. Oh, man. I’m sure that’s all been resolved by now.

00:19:25.84 [Tim Wilson]: So how, and I know Josh, you give, you can spend half a day talking about this because I’ve seen you sort of talk about it, but how easily is it to hit like the three or four things that are the things about a tag manager? I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of people who are listening who already have a tag manager. There are plenty of people who are listening who say, well, we’ve got GTM because we’re a GA shop and GTM was free. But I am still a little fuzzy on, I mean, I know that you’ve got, preferences for different tag managers in different situations and we sort of discussed we weren’t going to have you name which ones those were in which cases but what are sort of the things that you say wow if you’re doing X then you really need a tag manager that supports that and they don’t all support that or maybe that’s not the right way to frame it.

00:20:14.91 [Josh West]: Well, I mean, I guess the first question that I always ask clients is, you know, do you plan to deploy your AB testing solution through your tag management system? Because if you do, that’s going to eliminate a few things right off the bat.

00:20:30.38 [Tim Wilson]: And is that the ability to deploy an asynchronous tag? Is that the key phrase?

00:20:35.37 [Michael Helbling]: It’s actually the ability to deploy a synchronous, not in other words, a blocking script so that the A-B test can run without a screen flicker.

00:20:42.98 [Josh West]: Yeah, so Satellite and Insight and we’re both built with that in mind and TVM pretty quickly came out with something that would work for theirs too. I think is going to get there because they’ve got this Google Optimize product. In fact, I think they might even be beta testing something now that will allow you to deploy Optimize through GTM. So they’re going to get there too. Signal never really took it on. So, I mean, I guess too, like if there are other tags, I mean, it’s you just need to, you know, put Optimize the Adobe target in the head of your site and outside of your tag management system, then You can probably survive, but what other types of things do you want to do? That’s kind of the first decision you have to make because you can eliminate a couple of tools right off the bat if that’s an absolute must for you. That’s one thing to think about. I think the next thing is to think about your stack. If you’re a Google shop or you’re an Adobe shop and 90% of the tags that you use are those, Google has integrations with pretty much all of its tags built right in to help you out and Adobe is kind of the same way with DTM and the other systems, they offer all those integrations as well. They also offer integrations with a lot of other tools out there. Let’s take DTM for example. DTM has integrations with pretty much all of the Adobe products as you’d expect. and then with Google Analytics. And if you want to deploy other tags, you can. But you have to be prepared to write the code yourself. And I think a lot of companies are not really prepared for that because all of the tools out there, I think in the sales process, they kind of tell you, oh, you never have to write code again. And that’s not really the case. And then even sometimes, you know, you might think, Oh, well, Google has this, this integration with floodlight or, you know, one of the other, you know, all the vendors offer these integrations with floodlight DFA. And you’re like, Oh, well, this is, this is great. And then you realize that, no, I still have to do a little customization. So it’s, I mean, not just to pick on Adobe, because sometimes I think, you know, the sales guy tells you, Oh yeah, we integrate with double click. or we integrate with Adobe Analytics, well, the fact that they integrate with them does not mean that it’s just cut and dry plug and play for you. You’re still going to have to do the work.

00:23:05.83 [Tim Wilson]: It’s not necessarily as smooth and easy and turnkey as Genesis integration.

00:23:12.00 [Josh West]: Now, there are tools out there that if you really go to the effort of building a really good data layer and things like that, then you can probably hand over the integration of a lot of simple marketing tags to your marketers and just kind of turn them loose. I don’t know that’s a good thing. I have some ideas about how much you want to do that. But you know there are tools out there with a really slick UI. Somebody can go in and add a tag pretty quickly without a lot of effort. But I think sometimes the promise is that they all do that. And that’s not really been my experience. I don’t know if you feel the same way, Michael.

00:23:50.76 [Michael Helbling]: No, I’m very pleased that most vendors in the space have stopped saying, you never have to write a line of code again. And the other thing, because the initial use case for tag management was to get around IT deployment cycles, there is this concept, and frankly, a lot of marketing and IT organizations across lots of different companies don’t exactly get along great, but this concept of sort of an anti-type nature where marketing was going to get its own way instead not let IT control what they could do is actually working at cross purposes in a lot of cases to what should actually be happening to kind of make digital experiences better. And so actually what I’ve seen work the best is that tag management instead of using it to get away from actually becomes a collaboration point so that better governance and better collaboration happens so that it still owns. the digital site, but marketing has a way to get their priorities or needs met. And when it happens that way, I feel like it’s much more productive. And so tag management, I feel like in the last three years, is slowly pivoted towards a much more useful. framework, which is not about let’s get around IT and never talk to them again or never write code again, but rather let’s use this tool to kind of manage all of our stuff. So we have one place where we can get tagging done effectively efficiently and move our move us forward together. So, you know, my my dream is marking an IT strolling along hand in hand. But it also brings us to where is the future going and what will happen in the year 2000.

00:25:36.61 [Michael Helbling]: In the year 2000.

00:25:39.85 [Michael Helbling]: Come on, Tim, you got to do it. What? Do you know the old Conan sketch? No. In the year 2000. All right, never mind.

00:25:50.09 [Tim Wilson]: Throwing the, hey, I’ll make a pop culture reference that Tim will pick right up on.

00:25:54.48 [Michael Helbling]: I’m living for the day. I’m living for the day, Tim. Keep throwing them out there. I’ll get one of them. That’s right. Someday it’s going to happen. That’s also my dream. So maybe we should, because we were talking about tag management in the future, let’s talk about data layers. We haven’t really talked about the future, actually. Well, we’re getting to it. We’re warming up to it, Tim. This is all context building.

00:26:19.95 [Tim Wilson]: narcolepsy inducing.

00:26:22.75 [Michael Helbling]: There are five or six people who are probably going to find this very interesting. Thank you very much. Josh, me and our immediate families.

00:26:32.12 [Josh West]: I hope that my colleague does too.

00:26:33.84 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. So do we want to not talk about data layers? Is that what I’m hearing?

00:26:38.87 [Tim Wilson]: No, I think data layers. Data layers are good because it kind of built, I think, what I think you get, where I think my vague understanding of where you guys kind of agree on the future. Yeah, your honor, I’m going somewhere with this.

00:26:49.36 [Michael Helbling]: OK, I’ll allow it. I’ll allow it. There you go. What does this have to do with bird law? All right, did you get that one Tim?

00:26:57.61 [Tim Wilson]: No, I did not.

00:26:58.84 [Michael Helbling]: It’s another it’s always sunny reference given our son.

00:27:02.72 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah.

00:27:03.38 [Michael Helbling]: All right. So I think it’s pretty standard Josh and I don’t know. I feel like you probably see a broader cross section. So I’m wondering if you see any different but It’s pretty standard now to incorporate a data layer into most tag management implementations and certainly maybe for a minute we set aside Google’s data layer concept because it’s a little bit different from a structural perspective but what have you seen out there or is that true or does that sound right to you.

00:27:30.71 [Josh West]: Yeah, we, I mean, we push all of our clients to have a data layer because I mean, it makes everything so much easier when you’re implementing tag management. If you don’t have a data layer, if you’re sort of relying on scraping the dong and stuff like that, then, you know, you can get by with it, but you’re going to have just as much work as you did before.

00:27:48.54 [Michael Helbling]: Right. Well, and if you ever do a B test, then suddenly break things because you’re changing elements on the page. Right.

00:27:55.77 [Josh West]: Exactly.

00:27:56.69 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. No, so I think that’s that’s right. And it’s interesting because, you know, coming from the satellite background that I came from, you know, we obviously were building a tool so people could kind of do that any way they wanted to and not forcing the issue. But more and more, I think it’s right to kind of try to at least insist that this is the way you want to go. Is this the best practice? But that does bring to mind the fact that it is probably the biggest risk to successful tag management and digital analytics implementations in terms of success because you have to incorporate site development in the process in a way that’s not always well understood in terms of what a data layer is and how to do it. That’s one thing we certainly run into and so built a lot of tools to kind of help collaborate with developers and teach them how to do it. But I’m not sure. And I think there’s some stuff happening to make data layers easier. And certainly, you know, like I think helium’s data layer is pretty straightforward.

00:28:57.64 [Josh West]: And the other really great thing about theirs is the way that it just is like it’s baked right into the product. Yeah, it’s sort of, I know eventually we’re going to talk about, you know, where is the market going? And the fact that they built their data layer like that allowed them to do some really cool stuff with some of their other product. So when I say it’s baked right in, a lot of times when you build a data layer, if you give a developer the responsibility for coming up with how the data layer should look, they’re going to think about it in a way that, you know, they want it to be trying to think of the best way to describe this. So they’re going to think of it in terms of a hierarchy. So, you know, I go to a page and the page loads, and there’s a couple of different groups of data that I might care about. So there’s data, you know, I might want to know about the page, what’s its name, what’s its type, there’s data I might want to know about the visitor or the, or that user, what’s his user ID, what type of, what type of visitor is he or she, you know product information so like what products are they looking at and so a developer goes in and thinks about a data layer like a developer would they say I’m gonna make this one big hierarchical object and if I need to find the page name then it’s then I have to drill down into the hierarchy to find you know the right place I have to look in not just in the data layer but in the page object and inside the page object I have to look for the name helium basically said, hey, we’re going to make our data layer flat. Everybody needs to have a flat data layer. And the reason we want it too is because we want when you log in, when you log into our UI, we want to make it really easy for you to find things, to map them, to pass them to different tags. So, you know, a JavaScript developer would probably look at helium’s data layer and say, well, this is kind of weird. But it kind of simplified things, I think, from within their UI. But yeah, I mean, so basically it’s when you build your data layer in Telium, it’s set up in a way that makes it really easy to use that data within the tool, where the other products, they don’t really restrict you. They kind of let you do whatever you want, which is both good and bad. I mean, it allows you to come up with a really hierarchical, semantical data object, and that’s great. It does sometimes make it a little bit less intuitive to take advantage of the data within the tool.

00:31:16.88 [Michael Helbling]: Yep. Well, and DTM launched that AEM integration, which you can steal from and add a custom data layer schema to, which then populates data elements. So they’re making moves toward that more friendly model that Thelium introduced without necessarily putting you into a flat data layer structure, which is kind of nice.

00:31:39.58 [Tim Wilson]: AEM being Adobe Experience Manager.

00:31:41.97 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, yeah.

00:31:42.87 [Tim Wilson]: Sorry. No, I get it. I’m just thinking there that I kind of bounce across different clients. So I’m following most of these. Tim, would it surprise you to learn that you’re probably actually more technical than I am? I think we could do a whole episode debating that.

00:32:00.75 [Michael Helbling]: Okay. That might be what this episode is right now.

00:32:04.42 [Tim Wilson]: I appreciate when I volunteered that the first time I ever saw the inside of a tag manager was you standing at my desk showing it to me. And I was like, what are you talking about? What do you mean, this tag? OK, maybe that’s a little bit of an extreme.

00:32:18.82 [Michael Helbling]: OK, but that was probably about three weeks after I started working at Search Discovery. But before that point, I didn’t even know what a CSS selector was. So I was just a quick study. No. But you’re right. And kind of taking data layers and consuming them into the tools in more friendly ways is absolutely a thing that every tag management tool should do. But also data layers themselves can really help companies standardize on common pieces of data that they can use kind of across a lot of different things. So it’s generally a good thing. All right. So next question. What’s the future look like?

00:33:01.36 [Tim Wilson]: Which is the core premise of

00:33:03.29 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, well, again, Tim, we’re building up to it. Okay. It’s like with any TMS implementation, you can’t just go slapping the tags on the page.

00:33:11.47 [Tim Wilson]: You got to do a lot of work on one line of code. Just put this bootstrap.js and you’ll never work with it again.

00:33:18.48 [Josh West]: And then let your developer spend the next five years writing CSS electors to find the. No, but I mean, that’s right. I mean, I think that the future, I mean, we’ve talked about a few things. So I mean, I do think that at some point there’ll be some, there’ll be something that happens for mobile apps that, you know, whether it makes server to server more usable, more realistic, you know, I think that’s, that’s something to think about, whether it’s something that makes mobile tag management a little bit easier to do, you know, that might be something that comes along. But I also think you got to look at what all of these different vendors are doing. So we’ve talked a little bit about the fact that none of them really consider their tag management system to be, well, maybe it’s still their core business, but not their only thing they do anymore. So if you look at what some of them are doing, so let’s start. I was going alphabetical order, so I don’t offend anyone, but Insighton has… So you skipped a dubby? Well, okay.

00:34:22.29 [Tim Wilson]: You’re calling that D. Yes.

00:34:25.44 [Josh West]: Okay.

00:34:25.70 [Michael Helbling]: No, that’s, I still, that’s still before, oh man, you just offended. Paging Ben Gaines. Paging Ben Gaines.

00:34:34.46 [Josh West]: Okay. So let’s, let’s go back. So Adobe DTM. So, I mean, The reason I skipped Adobe is because it no longer became their core offering when satellite was acquired by Adobe. Adobe does lots of different things. It’s part of the marketing cloud. I was at Summit and there were some sessions on DTM, but it’s a really small piece of the whole thing. Even Adobe Analytics was probably not really the core focus of the Summit this year, which is probably really weird for some of us that have been going for years and years and years. But I think Adobe DTM is just part of the marketing cloud. And Sighton, they’ve got all kinds of products. They acquired Antimetric, so they’ve got a tool for analytics. They’ve got I can’t even remember what the name of it is, but the tag testing tool, they’ve got something smaller, but similar to what a tool like ObservePoint does, where they can actually set up some monitoring for you. They’ve got their optimization platform, which is relatively new for them, so they’ve got lots of stuff. Telium has Audience Stream, which is the one that I think people ask me the most about, hey, have you seen Audience Stream? And that kind of goes back to the fact that their data layer is so tightly coupled with their platform that it basically allowed them to push that data anywhere you wanted to go, including back to their servers where then you can push it out in all kinds of different ways. Basically, I mean, You mentioned DMP, I mean, Audience Stream is kind of like a first party DMP for them. Right. And so, you know, they’re still pushing out updates weekly for their TLM IQ, their tag management system. But I think Audience Stream is getting a lot of their focus right now because there’s a lot of people that are interested in a tool like that. And then Signal has Fuse, I think they still call it Fuse. I think they still call it Fuse. But it’s a similar idea, and it’s more of a platform. So where all of these tools were, they started out as basically JavaScript manipulation tools, it’s much more about the data now. When it’s like in sight and has something that there that sounds similar to that too right there all sort of say and site has activate which is like a takes the data and stuff on your website and allows you to kind of personalize and act on it in real time.

00:37:09.70 [Tim Wilson]: So unless this goes way down a rabbit hole, is the Adobe, because we talked about Adobe being kind of the sweet in the platform, does the marketing cloud ID concept for Adobe, is that them doing similar to what kind of the TMS driven ones that are saying we can identify and push and share this data across different systems? Or is that me trying to draw a parallel that’s not

00:37:34.27 [Michael Helbling]: No, it’s not exactly the same because Adobe’s got audience manager, which is their DMP product, right? So that’s because they have a separate complete DMP that can house first, second, third party data. So DTM inside of the marketing cloud fits in what they’re calling activation, right? Which is how do you set up the marketing cloud in your organization? You use activation to make it all happen. Or before it was called core services, right? But today they basically are now the mobile SDK and DTM sit inside this construct called activation. So you’ll hear Adobe talk about it like that. And the idea is that all these other things become enabled from these. core services right from there. So tag management in that construct fits in terms of supporting all the other pieces of the marketing cloud, which is great for Adobe, not so great for people who don’t have a marketing cloud, right? And so that makes the question wonder like, okay, well Salesforce just bought a DMP, you know, or another DMP, I don’t know how many they own now, but Crux, you know, was acquired a little while back. So could they be in the market for a TMS at some point to kind of fulfill or fill out that competitive landscape? And to the same extent, Google doesn’t have a marketing cloud. They have a measurement suite, but it’s also a marketing cloud. They just like to say that it’s not a marketing cloud, but they have a DMP that they’re coming out with. They have a tag management tool, but it’s all going to basically do the same thing.

00:39:07.54 [Tim Wilson]: Just to back up a little bit specifically I’m talking about the marketing cloud ID like in what Adobe was when they were pitching.

00:39:14.71 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, but you don’t have to use tag management to enable the marketing cloud visitor ID service. Absolutely.

00:39:20.64 [Josh West]: I understand that you want to talk about visitor stitching kind of.

00:39:23.91 [Tim Wilson]: I think, because it seems like that’s what a lot of these other vendors are doing is saying, we can kind of collect this in multiple places. We can, I think in Insighting’s case, they’ll say, and we’ll generate an ID and drop our ID, and then we can push that out to a DMP. Or these other ones, just because you don’t have a DMP doesn’t mean you can’t play in the, be it visitor stitching or just visitor identification. Like it’s still, nothing you said, Michael makes me think that no part of the core of this isn’t Two similar but different ways of skinning this cat if I want to get as close to a 360 degree view of the customer without naming my product 360, which has nothing to do with really a 360 degree view of the customer. Thank you, Google.

00:40:08.21 [Michael Helbling]: Well, hey, Adobe was first at making weird names for their products. Thank you very much. And to be fair, Tim, I’m not saying that strategy is good, bad, or indifferent. I’m just trying to explain how Adobe explains their product suite. I’m not trying to say that’s what everybody should do.

00:40:25.83 [Tim Wilson]: But I guess what I’m saying is if you so you have a DMP or you’re using a DMP, whether it’s part of your core stack and you’re you’re on the Adobe stack or the future Google stack or whatever, I want to be able to pass information, you know, go back Go back three years, four years, and my DMP says, drop this pixel directly on your site so that we can identify these folks for retargeting our audience development. We’ve kind of moved a little beyond that of saying, well, gee, you shouldn’t just be dropping a dumb pixel that all we know is whatever we passed in that pixel. You’ve got a data layer. Enrich that data a little bit. Maybe you’re shoving it to the other from Adobe to Adobe for the DMP. Maybe you’re shoving it from Google to blue-kai, but the tag management with the data layer with a cookie is kind of what’s enabling that, right? Or am I way off base?

00:41:22.27 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. I mean, but this is where it gets complicated because, and again, this is where my point of view diverges from where a lot of the vendors in the space are going, is I kind of think it doesn’t make sense to try to make a TMS, a backbone of a DMP. It’s just get a DMP. Well, but if you get a real DMP, you still have to feed the DMP. Well, of course. So do the tagging in your TMS. But use, and so that’s where I kind of have this thing is sort of like, I get, and actually, you know, I personally have not had the opportunity to work with some of those tools, but I’ve heard a lot of very positive things about, especially TeleM audience streams. So I don’t, I’m not trying to say there’s negative things about those tools, but they’re not pure DMPs yet. But are they trying to be?

00:42:12.07 [Josh West]: I don’t know if they want to be either. I mean, in Sighton’s, their unique ID may be a little different, but I mean, I don’t think Kilian wants AudienStream to be like that. I mean, I don’t think any of them are really trying to become DNPs, but

00:42:28.67 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and I have a somewhat cynical view in terms of, I think, DMPs today attract a lot of venture attention and acquisition attention. So in a certain sense, I’m like, yes, they do want to be DMPs because they need somebody to eventually help them exit. But that’s a more of a financial question. My point of view about the future of tag management is that it needs to return to where it came from, which is we all run our websites off of content management systems. And in reality, the tags we manage are just pieces of content to serve a different purpose. And that integration should just keep happening. We need to get closer and closer so that I can run my website and my tags all in the same place. I can govern all assets, including my tags, in the same place. And I don’t know what that looks like, because I don’t like the idea if you buy a CMS, you’re suddenly locked into that TMS. Like you should still have some freedom of choice but wouldn’t it be nice if vendors were addressing that so that there was really tight integration so if I was on AEM if I was on site core or if I was on dot or whoever’s cool in the CMS space today, my TMS is just a sort of an integrated aspect of that.

00:43:39.79 [Tim Wilson]: then that covers your content tags, but then when you go to your user or visitor attributes, now you’ve got to rely on your CMS to be integrated with your whatever CRM or wherever that might be passing other tags. I totally agree with you.

00:43:52.88 [Michael Helbling]: Well, ideally, tag management would just let you deploy any marketing or measurement technology you want.

00:43:57.72 [Tim Wilson]: No, no, no, but I’m talking more of the data layer, right? As Josh was talking about, when I visit a page, I mean at the core, there’s sort of two things. What am I viewing and doing, and who am I, right?

00:44:09.77 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, basically there’s state data, there’s page data, for lack of a better word, and then there’s U data, event data. And so all those things map into your data layer, but you can pass those around once they’re in a data layer anywhere you want. But it’s more about just bringing it back to where it all started, which is, in essence, it should have all been built into content management from the beginning. Or at least that’s that is just one guy’s opinion. And certainly, you know, the move into, you know, kind of, you know, some of the other vendors in the space into sort of what I would say towards DMPs and maybe it’s unfair to call them that and they just find it differently. So I don’t want to belabor that, but that I feel like is an area. But I feel like I don’t see a strong future for that because the more appetite I get for a DMP, The more I want to use a dmp and the less I need to use one that isn’t truly a dmp.

00:45:08.43 [Tim Wilson]: Mind blown.

00:45:09.79 [Michael Helbling]: I mean, I don’t know.

00:45:11.31 [Tim Wilson]: Josh, you’re still there. He’s gone. I need to balance.

00:45:15.44 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah.

00:45:15.94 [Josh West]: Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with you. I mean, I hope that they’re not trying to turn themselves into dmp’s because there are already some pretty good tools out there that do that. I mean, I think that the real power really is, you know, we’ve got all this data and What what can we do with it so I mean so here’s an example so when I was when I first started to mystified I remember I went and sat in a demo I saw a demo of webtrend streams and you know webtrends sort of focus that on. you know, data visualization, like this looks really cool. And sort of right at the very end of the conversation, they were like, yeah, and we’re kind of talking with some vendors, like an email vendor about, you know, maybe doing some remarketing where we can take this real time data and remarket to customers. And I was like, Oh, that’s, that’s actually kind of cool. Like I don’t know what CEO is going to pay for data visualization like this. But like when it’s real time data with a purpose, That’s much cooler and like I don’t know that that ever totally materialized and then you know fast forward a year or so and I saw a demo of a tea Williams audience stream and I was like wow like this is actually kind of what they were talking about this is what web trends was saying hey this is you know like another use case we came up with. That’s kind of where I think we’ve got all this data. What can we do with it? How can we push it out to these vendors, not just so that they can keep stats, but so that they can act on it in real time, so that they can push data back down to the visitor as they engage with the site that might make them more likely to convert, or maybe we can remarket to them in a different channel, like we can send them an email or That’s the kind of thing that I think is the real power of what do you do with the data? I don’t know that… Yeah, I agree with that.

00:47:17.32 [Michael Helbling]: The whole point of leveraging this data is to do something different for different people at the point in time that they need something different done, whether that be a different experience, a different offer, whatever it is. And so to the extent that you can do that with your own site, awesome. To the extent that you can go outside other vendors and have them leverage that data in real time. That’s also awesome. I just think it’s not, it doesn’t necessarily have to happen in the context of sort of, you know, it living inside of.

00:47:46.89 [Tim Wilson]: The TMS the extreme just I’ve got to have my dose of extreme skepticism like the gap that the gap between we have all this data and here are things we can do with it. I mean I feel like that that is like the bane of the whole industry’s existence and that’s how 70% of the stuff gets sold is hey you can.

00:48:04.79 [Michael Helbling]: Tim, you’ve got so much data, just collect it all. We’ll figure out what to do with it later.

00:48:09.06 [Tim Wilson]: Well, but it’s so easy to draw. I mean, in the web trends is a great example, because I remember the same thing. Like they had to have this visualization, but they talk about it like, well, wait a minute, are you saying that you’re going to have somebody just sitting watching the visualization? Clearly, the visualization is just an illustration of what the data is. But guess what? You’ve got to actually operationalize the integration to trigger that stuff. You know, it’s marketing automation falls in the same track that you can have all this glorious nurturing program that’s personalized and tailored content. But guess what? You need the content. You have to actually generate stuff and plan. And that’s, I still get nervous when the vendors are kind of driving the discussion and saying, these are the things that we can do. And that’s great but then to get from somebody saying I am willing to I have the resources I’m gonna make I get the vision I have the resources I’m willing to make the investment and then stick with it because it’s gonna be painful and the devil’s in the flipping details. To actually pull this off and instead what happens is I get the vision. I have the resources, I invest in it, and I don’t have the fortitude to actually really plan it out. And it’s not driven by, this is specifically the three things that I’m going to do, and I’m gonna relentlessly march towards that. It’s kind of a buy the tool, and then we’ll do all these cool things. And there’s a crap ton of business process work that has to be done to get there. Rant over. In rant.

00:49:33.31 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Well, no, but it makes it immediately makes me think about the personalization episode with Matt Gershauf. We talk about sort of that scaling limit, you know, as you go into more and more personalization. How do you do that at scale? Anyway, this is this is great, Josh. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Your insights are profound and well balanced, I would say. So that’s way different than what we usually have just being when it’s Tim and me. So thank you so much. But we also love to do a segment on each show called last call. And we just kind of go around and talk about anything we’ve seen recently that we think is interesting, helpful tool, interesting article, whatever it is. So I will open it up to who wants to go first.

00:50:21.44 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll start since you stole the guy’s name from me. This falls is sort of interesting and I don’t fully understand it, but Mr. Gershaw, Matt Gershaw from Conductorix, wrote a couple of blog posts back a couple of months ago, and I can’t quite let them go. because I don’t fully understand them and I’ve read them two or three times and he’ll tell me that I do understand them and I don’t. But there’s one is, I think the first one that he wrote was about prediction, pooling and shrinkage, which is a fascinating topic and talks about sort of how you can kind of look at the data that you’re working with and kind of split it and kind of work with it in different ways. And then he followed that up with one that’s segmentation and shrinkage. And I aspire to someday fully understand everything that’s in it. But they are kind of intriguing posts that I recommend checking out. And if you say, wow, that went way over my head, then you’re in company with me. If you say, oh, we’re talking Frequencies versus Bayesian, I know that. And I have a strong opinion, then you’re more in Gershov’s company. But I recommend them. It’s kind of a good way to sort of realize there’s always places to grow. Nice.

00:51:34.56 [Michael Helbling]: Alright Josh you got you got one.

00:51:37.17 [Josh West]: Yeah, so mine is actually it’s not like a blog post or something that I that I found out there is actually a conversation that I had and it’s actually it was with Tim last week so last week Tim and I were doing some planning and I think it was a good reminder to me that no matter what you do

00:51:55.44 [Tim Wilson]: Use really small words.

00:51:58.88 [Josh West]: No matter what you do, there’s somebody else out there that wants to know more about it or doesn’t quite understand it. And you know, sometimes I think, so what facility facilitated the conversation was, you know, we were talking about, I was saying, you know, I wish I, I get all these ideas for blog posts. And then I’m like, I don’t know what he really wants to know about that because I’m more on the technical side. And I think most of the people in this industry come from a little bit different perspective than I do. I don’t know that developers really care to know my insights either because it’s not really you know that my development expertise is definitely more focused on the digital analytics space and. Tim immediately wrote down five blog posts. He’s like, these are five things that I think you could tell me more about that I’d like to know more about. And I was like, oh, well, this is great because it’s the kind of thing that I’d come up with that idea and I’d be like, oh, that’s so simple. Nobody cares. But it’s to, you know, to somebody that thinks like I do, maybe, but, you know, You guys could write a bunch of blog posts and i’d be like oh wow this is great i never thought of that it’s just you know sometimes i think we have tunnel vision we only see the world through our own eyes and it’s a it was just a good reminder to me that you know that everybody has something that they can offer other people they just need to figure out exactly what it is.

00:53:17.08 [Tim Wilson]: So by the time people are listening to this, this podcast, this episode and the time it comes out and you’re like, man, I noticed Josh West has been blogging like crazy.

00:53:24.43 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, exactly. Great topics. Tim Wilson, take your credit. Actually, Josh, I’m going to take what you just said and I’m going to replay it for a bunch of people on my team because this is not just you, but a lot of people who And I even early on in earlier years felt that way too. It’d be like, oh, nobody wants to know about this. And then you eventually write that blog post and it’s like, everyone’s reading this on your blog and like, hey, that was a really good article. And you’re like, oh, I guess people do. There are people who find that helpful. And it’s a really good learning. So thanks for sharing that. And that’s, yeah, I’m going to use that as corroboration for what I tell people as well. All right, my last call since we’re talking a little TMS, I’m going to jump into a little tool that was developed by a homie of mine by Jim Gordon. It’s a tool called Tag Titian, which is sort of right along with Dynamic Tag Manager. It’s a nice little tool for leveraging some of the features better and getting some better information about Adobe DTM. I don’t know if they have plans to build it out for maybe other tools, but it’s really cool what they’ve built so far. So I’m giving a little shout out. Go Jim Gordon. Go Jim. Yeah. All right. Well, as you’ve been listening to this, our pre anti penultimate episode of the year, which is our fourth to last episode of the year. I just had to find a way to work that in and then I screwed up the pronunciation. Whatever. I’m sure you’ve been thinking, oh my gosh, Michael, you are so wrong about the future of TMS and Josh is so right. Or perhaps vice versa. And if it is vice versa, we’d love to hear about it on the measure. I’m just kidding. If you have thoughts or questions or want to talk about what we discussed about tag management, love to hear from you, both on our Facebook page, Twitter, on the measure slack. I think you’re on the measure slack, Josh. If you’re not, you will be, because I think people are going to be banging on your door soon.

00:55:29.28 [Josh West]: I am. I sort of look on there. Every once in a while, I’ll make a small contribution. I’m definitely not as active as either of you two, though.

00:55:37.11 [Michael Helbling]: Fair enough. I just basically exist to be that weird Drunk Helps icon. Is this going to be my claim to fame? This is getting used a lot. Anyways, I’m it’s okay. Just go with it. Anyways, so but yeah, we’d love to hear from you great conversation again with most of our shows We feel like we just scratched the very tippy top of the surface and certainly feels that way here Thank You Josh for coming on and balancing out Tim’s extreme bias you can tell which tool he liked the best the whole time It’s what you showed him at his death. Yeah, exactly That was probably satellite back. It was definitely so okay. So there you go Just like I was shown satellite by Evan LaPointe.

00:56:25.62 [Josh West]: He showed it to me, too See there you go.

00:56:28.42 [Michael Helbling]: Who did he not show it to exactly? Oh Anyways, it’s been great to have you. Thank you so much for coming on the show Josh It’s been a pleasure and for all of you listening out there out there in analyst land because it’s a TMS episode keep tagging

00:56:50.11 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter or Measure Slack Group. We welcome your comments and questions.

00:56:58.38 [Josh West]: Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

00:57:14.58 [Michael Helbling]: I’ll say a word and Josh, you just say the first thing that comes to your mind. Okay. All right. This is going to give me trouble.

00:57:24.84 [Josh West]: Crap. You can’t repeat that. See, I told you.

00:57:32.60 [Michael Helbling]: I pay very close attention to what Joseph Stanhope is doing. Okay, well I think we’ve got our first topic. I mean what’s the most important thing on a pizza? The dough, the sauce, the cheese. So apparently the fourth to last is the pre-antipenultimate, so I think that’s definitely getting used. I know, I guess I’m still a little offended that he was like, on a show about New Zealand’s power hour, please bring on somebody who knows about tech management. And I was like, ew, ew, ew, ew.

00:58:10.22 [Tim Wilson]: That’s awesome. This is awesome.

00:58:19.90 [Michael Helbling]: You’ve got some visitors.

00:58:23.99 [Michael Helbling]: Okay, we’ll fix it in post.

00:58:25.95 [Michael Helbling]: Don’t worry about it. There’s no lock on this door and I warned my wife beforehand she had to keep the kids out and they’ve snuck away. Oh, it’s fine. It’s quite alright.

00:58:35.67 [Michael Helbling]: That’s incredible.

00:58:39.20 [Tim Wilson]: Rock flag and tag management.

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