Traffic Light: Conversion Tag strategies
Tuesday, May 14th, 2013By: Michael Lamb, Sr. Product Manager, DG MediaMind
Third-party ad serving has many advantages that agencies can leverage. One of these is the ability to record a user’s journey from ad impression through to purchase. This journey is called the path to conversion. In order for the agency to mark milestones on this path as well as the conclusion, it is important to place conversion tags on the advertiser’s site.

What are conversion tags?
Conversion tags are either snippets of JavaScript or a 1×1 image pixel. These bits of code are placed at strategically important spots on the advertiser’s site. The conversion tag “fires” when a user visits a strategically important page. At that time, the user’s local cookie is updated with the event ID and a date/time stamp of the event. We can pull data from the page and send that back to the ad server for analytics. We can also write information into the user’s cookie for future use, for example retargeting.
Where should I put conversion tags?
Best practice is to do an audit of the advertiser’s website anytime major changes are made. Most agencies will have multiple personas for different target audiences. “In Market” might be one target audience. “Considering brands” might be another. Role-play the possible activities your target audiences might take on the advertiser’s site. Mark down the URLs of specific locations where they may abandon their session or need more information. For each of these URLs, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Why do I need to track this location?
2. Would I need to modify my creative messaging to a user that’s been to this location?
3. Do I need any additional data from the page to understand the user’s journey? (product name, local zip code)
The results of a tag audit are usually presented in a spreadsheet. It’s best to prioritize the items on this list, i.e. which conversion points are the critical paths and which conversion points are important, but not critical?
Many agencies simply want to tag everything on the advertiser’s site. This presents three challenges. First, keeping up with site changes can be challenging. Second, if everything gets tagged right away, then you may be drowning clients in too much data. Third, if you tag everything at once, there’s nowhere to grow.
We recommend putting a plan in action which allows you to grow the tagging strategy over time. This helps you set expectations with the advertiser and better manage the incoming stream of data. For example, start with collecting point-of-purchase conversions and a few key locations. Then phase in product-level or category-level retargeting. A final phase might be to tag social and interactive actions on the advertiser’s site.
What is “piggybacking” tags?
Placing individual pieces of code on the advertiser’s site is a time-consuming process. Years ago, ad technology companies didn’t need a major presence on the advertiser’s site. Now everyone and their cousin wants to put their conversion tags on the advertiser’s site. To accommodate this, ad servers allow you to attach or piggyback other vendors’ code onto the ad server’s conversion tag. When a user visits a conversion page, the ad server conversion tag is loaded first, and then any piggybacked tags are loaded into the user’s browser.
Are conversion tags important for branding clients?
We recommend the presence of some conversion tags for branding as well as direct-response clients. The ties between display advertising and brand lift carry over into activities users perform on an advertiser’s site. Conversion tags can be linked to coupon downloads, account sign-ins, social sharing buttons, newsletter sign-ups and even video views and game play. These events become part of a path- to-conversion analysis which gives agencies more commentary on how brand advertising is affecting consumer behavior online.
What’s all this talk about Tag Management?
As agencies and technology companies have gotten more sophisticated, the demands for tagging have increased greatly. It’s not uncommon for an agency’s tag audit to yield 500 to1000 different conversion “points” that need tracking. Tag Management companies provide a single piece of code to the advertiser. This code is placed into their content management system and once there, the code will render on each and every page of the advertiser’s site. This paradigm allows an agency to use the Tag Management user interface to map where they want conversion events to occur without the need to send hundreds or thousands of code snippets to the agency that is responsible for managing the advertiser’s website.
Not every advertiser needs tag management. Its benefits are ideal for advertisers with large sites, sites that change frequently, or web developers that don’t like to accept lots of code from third parties.








