13 Must-Know Terms for the Privacy Savvy Digital Marketer

Web tags are the tiny powerhouses of JavaScript code at the heart of your marketing operations. Dropped into your web pages, they bring your martech stack to life: enabling your website to interact intelligently with your visitors, fuelling your marketing and advertising campaigns, and providing the data you need to hone your operations.

However, with great power comes responsibility, and tags sit at an increasingly busy and often baffling intersection, where technology, customer trust, and business risks all compete for due attention.

As an aid to navigation, we've curated a handy list of the 13 most important terms you need to know to start mastering your tags and their associated risks, rewards, and obligations.

Technology

1. Adtech: Advertising technology used to deliver and monitor advertising campaigns, with a focus on delivering efficient, high-ROI ad campaigns.

2. Martech: Marketing technology that provides insights into customers, web traffic, or lead generation campaigns.

3. Widgets & embeds: Resources such as a Twitter feed or social media button that use HTML and/or JavaScript to display data on a company's site.

4. Web tags: Snippets of JavaScript code injected into a website for multiple purposes including advertising, analytics and social media.

5. Piggybacks tags: Hidden tags injected indirectly into a site by a third-party, through JavaScript.

Customer Trust

6. Opt In: A choice consumers can make to allow their personal information and online activity to be collected by a specific website or company.

7. Opt out: A choice consumers can make to no longer allow their personal information and online activity to be collected by a specific website or company.

8. Personal information: Information that is collected by websites typically includes identifying data such as name, address, phone number.

9. Sensitive data: Data which includes credit card numbers, mobile device ID and IP address, and other confidential data types.

Business risks

10. Exposure: The measure of potential future loss resulting from a specific activity or event.

11. Data breach: Occurs when an unauthorized party accesses and/or steals a company's customer or internal data.

12. Third-party vendor: A company that interacts with a vendor your company does business with.

13. Compliance: A broad term meaning, in a digital privacy context, that a company or brand website is following (complying with) rules set forth by regulations such as the GDPR in Europe and the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) in the US.

We've even turned this glossary into a comprehensive infographic to share.