Keeping track of tags: How one company boosted page load speeds by 150%

How many tags might be populating a company website? Now more than ever, it’s vital to know.

When Crownpeak conducted a study of Fortune 100 sites, it uncovered more than 1,700 tag redirects. These hidden third-party tags could leave sites exposed to data breaches under the GDPR, not to mention the oncoming CCPA, while also causing a total average latency of 5.2 seconds.

The worst-performing Fortune 100 sites had a total of 734 hidden third-party tags, twice the number of the average website in the study, and 7.5 times more than the 18 best-performing sites. Even more troubling? Those 20 worst sites also suffered a total 11.1 seconds of latency.

That’s a huge problem when you consider how 100 milliseconds of latency can cost you another 1% in conversions.

Exposing and controlling tags at the global level  

One global manufacturing corporation realized the need to adopt a tag management solution in order to gain control of the expanding network of martech tags deployed across their websites. With over $1 billion in revenues and operations in over 135 countries, the need – and the scope of the challenge – were huge.

As the company’s sites evolved to feature more and more tags from strategic partners, they had to take control of their digital marketing supply chain, manage risk, and optimize performance. As its Interactive Manager put it, “It was like the wild, wild west. Tags were being added in an uncontrolled process, redundant tags were accumulating, and our page performance and site security were suffering.”

In evaluating solutions, they came to pick Crownpeak Tag Auditor (a feature of TagControl). Why? Among the reasons was its industry-leading database of over 6,000 martech vendor tags and its Trackermap® tool, providing real-time visibility into their marketing supply chain.

Optimization that drove acceleration

With Tag Auditor, vendor tags were optimized across the company’s websites, and the number of them cut from 200 to under 100. Tag management was transformed, resulting in improved web performance as slow-loading tags were disabled, while in

“Before we implemented Tag Auditor, our page performance was crazy,” their Interactive Manager explains in a new case study detailing the implementation and its results. “With Tag Auditor, we’ve realized above-the-fold page load improvements of up to 150%. It’s been a huge improvement.”

Reducing risk and improving user experiences

The web team also found insecure tags using Tag Auditor that might have made pages vulnerable to various attacks. Plus, deploying insecure HTTP tags on HTTPS pages generates “mixed content warnings” in a user’s browser, compromising their confidence in the site and their user experience.

“With Tag Auditor, we can be confident that any tag vulnerabilities are swiftly identified and resolved and that we are delivering a secure and trustworthy experience,” the Interactive Manager points out. Moreover, Crownpeak helped embed a tag governance process where any new tags must undergo a robust UAT process where it has to prove compliance. When Tag Auditor detects a blacklisted tag, automatic notifications give an immediate heads-up to site managers and admins.

One vital outcome? The company now can leverage this tag monitoring and deployment framework to help it ensure its sites, and the tags operating on them, are compliant with the new spate of data privacy regulations springing up in markets around the globe.

Read the full case study, "Global Manufacturer Improves Page Load Speed by 150% with Crownpeak Tag Auditor."