One often overlooked part of managing and maintaining your analytics and marketing tech integrations is a properly organized tag inventory.
Depending on the structure or complexity of your tracking plan/measurement plan, you might be able to incorporate something like this into the document. However in my experience, the product or consumer analytics requirements are part of different workflows within organizations when compared to marketing tech. This makes sense, usually tracking events and data are made available first for capture in analytics and then passed on to marketing tech via a tag management solution.
When it comes to product or consumer analytics, there usually doesn’t end up being a lot of tech debt. When a product or feature is removed, it makes sense that the tracking will fall off. Where the tech debt may remain is in your tag manager, perhaps you have outdated rules that are just taking up space. This calls for a separate tip, log the rule name that triggered an analytics event in your analytics provider. Having the data will help you audit your tag manager implementation when needed.
Marketing tech debt is far more common for analytics engineering teams. We’ll always hear when something needs to be added ASAP to track a new campaign or vendor, but for the most part if the data flows accurately, that’s the last you’ll hear from your marketing partner. This is where your inventory comes in handy, performing scheduled audits every six months to yearly to remove outdated tags that could lead to data leakage or simply reducing performance…every fraction of a second helps in the UX world!
Before you start on the inventory, you’ll need to make sure you’re capturing the proper level of detail for your implementation. The basic attributes will include:
- Date Added
- Last Updated
- Vendor
- Internal Owner
- External Contact
- Purpose
- Tracking Scope
- Account IDs
- Related documents
These are just some of the main attributes to help you keep track of what’s implemented on your site, when it was last reviewed, where it’s tracking, and how to locate the code using the account ID. By keeping this document alive and updated accordingly, you can share the document and maintain transparency, while also supporting accountability.
