B2B marketers today are running a lot of different programs in order to get insights on their website: Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and probably many more. In order for these programs to run, your IT person/people had to put code (that icky thing that us marketers know so little about), on each page of your website. The code that is placed on a website for a program to run is called a “tag.”

What tags do to a website:

The more programs you are running on your website, and the more tags that have to run on each page, the slower your website gets. If you are keeping up with today’s SEO best practices, you know that slow websites are a no no for search engines and website visitors alike.

Not only can excessive tags slow down a website, but it can also lead to inaccurate data reporting.

Why does this matter to marketing?

Website speed is a critical component of user experience, SEO and can make or break your conversion rates. A slow website isn’t just a problem for your IT team to worry about, it has tangible affects on your everyday marketing efforts.

According to Amazon: “a delay of 0.1 seconds in a page’s load time can cause a one-percent decline in customer activity.”
According to iPullrank: “51 percent of U.S. shoppers claim they will abandon a purchase if a site takes too long.”
According to iPullrank: “A site that takes six seconds to load experiences a 50-percent conversion decline.”

What do we do?

Check out Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM organizes your tags and allows all the tags on a page to execute at the same time (instead of tags having to wait for other tags to execute before being able to execute). Warning: GTM setup requires some coding. If you don’t code, you will have to enlist the help of your IT department.

Want more info on GTM?

Check out this video from Google giving you a preview of how GTM works:

Want a little more in depth look at the tool? Take a look at this walk through:

Want some super in-depth info on GTM? iPullrank has a comprehensive guide to GTM (indeed very comprehensive) on their website. It’s actually a pretty interesting read.

Are you using Google Tag Manager? If not, It might be worth talking to your IT team or your agency about it.