The benefits of client-side tracking & tag management systems

What is client-side tracking?

You have a website, you want people to come to it and engage with your brand either by buying a product/service, filling out a form or routing out knowledge that’s important to them. You may also use vendors like TikTok, Facebook and Google Ads to bring users to your website. We would hope that you’re also testing your website rigorously to help find what works best for your users. All of these technologies need to be added to your website in some way in order to function so how do we add them?

Well, you have a few options, you could try adding their code snippets directly onto your website, this is known as “hard coding” and while it’s fairly simple to do, it isn’t what we’d recommend. Hard coding can slow down your website, can become very difficult to manage on an ongoing basis and costly if you need a developer to add the code for you. What we’d recommend is using a tag management system like Google Tag Manager or Launch. This can be done by executing code on the users’ browser (Client-Side) or via a server (Server-Side). This blog is going to discuss the benefits of client-side tracking (hence the title) but if you’re interested in server-side tracking we have a blog on that too!

What is a tag management system?

So, if hard coding isn’t recommended then how else will we get this Facebook code onto our website? Enter tag management systems (TMS), as the name suggests, a TMS manages multiple tags (snippets of code) and executes them when we need them to activate. This might be a remarketing tag that executes on every page or a conversion pixel that only appears on order confirmations. It does this by waiting for certain conditions to be met and injecting code snippets when the conditions are true. 

What are the benefits of a tag management system?

This may seem like a very round about way of implementing a piece of code but trust me, this approach comes with some benefits:

• You can make changes in a fraction of the time: If you want to go down the hard coding route you’ll need to gather the code requirements and talk to your developers, work it into the next sprint and potentially lose days or even weeks of data collection as a result. With a TMS you can set up the conditions and tags yourself and publish them independently of any developer cycles. This means you can collect data sooner and maintain it in a more agile way.
• You don’t need to know how to code: A facebook pixel on website A is actually 95% the same as facebook pixel on website B, they tend to only differ by a handful of minor account values like an account ID or a conversion name. Because of this, TMSs have lots of accessible templates with free form fields that mean needing to code isn’t necessary. This means a more manageable measurement solution because you don’t have to learn javascript or sift through lines of code, instead you just need to know your account information which is usually easy to find in the relevant vendor portals.
• The code loads asynchronously (and speeds up your website!): Asynchronous loading is the home run of TMSs. When you hard code tags or pixels the webpage will load that pixel first before moving onto the next one which can take some time, particularly if you have a lot of code to load! This is known as synchronous loading, with a TMS you get asynchronous loading, meaning that all tags can execute along-side each other. This results in faster page loads speeds and is another weapon in our armoury when it comes to our SEO strategy. Given that the probability of a bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds (according to google data), anything you can do to improve your site’s speed is worth investing in.

So, if you want a faster site, easier to manage tags and faster activation and you aren’t already using a TMS it’s about time you should, if you already are and want to take it to the next level then a server-side approach is for you. As ever if you need help in deploying something like GTM then you can always reach out to our team of experts, we’re happy to help.