Marketing tags: how does it work?
Marketing tags allow us to automatically optimize our ads and change ad content. We usually inform our customers or brand managers.
Two types of Tags
Marketing tags generally come in two types:
Remarketing tags
Placeholder Marketing tags are used to edit ad content and target users. They capture the data on the website and send it to the ad server. This allows you to change ad content based on user behavior. So if you’ve seen a product in an ad on a website, you now know that labels make this possible. In addition, they allow you to invest more money in interesting users, either by increasing your offer if a user has visited a certain area of your site, or just by a subset of users.
Conversion tags
The first group of labels is the conversion Marketing tags. These labels are used to track the performance of your ads. A user clicks on an ad and goes to your website. On the website, you paste a conversion label on a specific page or event, such as a shopping cart or thank you page. After the user activates this step, the conversion character is loaded. The ad server assigns the conversion indicator to the click and knows that the ad has triggered a conversion. Ad servers use this information to automatically optimize ads for good performance.
How users are identified
To assign ad click to a conversion or use remarketing data for a user, the ad server must identify a user. There are 4 ways to do this:
Cookies
On desktop and mobile Internet, identification is based on cookies. Users receive a cookie on the ad server’s domain (eg martechvault.com) when they see an ad. The click is attributed to this cookie. The conversion Marketing tags are also assigned to these cookies as they are hosted on the same domain (eg tracking.martechvault.com) so you can verify whether a user has clicked on the ad.
Logins
Google and the Facebook of this world enjoy the luxury of over a billion connected users. They can use this data to assign conversions to their ads. The biggest advantage is that they can do this on all devices (if the user is logged in at all).
Device IDs.
Cookies do not work for apps. Users are routinely redirected from an app that displays the ad to another app, the app to which the ad is linked (similar to sending a user from one browser to another, for example, from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome). The ad server needs a device ID to map data for conversion or comments on mobile devices. This ID is unique to your phone.
Fingerprinting
The ad server collects a series of data from the device (usually based on browser and computer settings) and combines it with an identifier. If conversion occurs, check whether the conversion is caused by the device’s own data collection.
Technical reach
In addition to two types of functional labels, conversion and remarketing, there are also two technical flavors:
- Image tag: A small image (usually 1 pixel by 1 pixel) is sent to share data with the ad server.
- Script tag: A script (usually JavaScript) is placed on the website to share data with the ad server.
The difference is that an image is static and a script is not. The content of a script can be changed by changing its data.
At the End
Marketing tags allow us to automatically optimize our campaigns, target users, and change ad content. This post will help you understand how it technically works. If you’re having trouble with your marketing boards, you should now have an idea of what to look for.
