Want to speed up your website by 25%? Find hidden web tags

One of the most basic digital marketing tenants is that fast page loads are the foundation of a great customer experience and, in turn, strong revenues. When pages respond slowly, customers leave, filling their online carts elsewhere.

How hidden web tags slow page loads

Martech tools help you to better understand customer behavior on digital properties, but they don't generally tell you how to improve page load speeds. In fact, each of the tens, hundreds, or thousands of martech tools your organization uses creates two types of web tags:

• First-party tags that connect your web pages with each particular martech application
• Third-party web tags that connect the martech application with other, unknown entities - thus, the term "hidden web tags"
  
  

Each of these tags makes and retrieves calls through JavaScript, and then syncs cookies. When there are third-party web tags on the site, there's another whole layer of round-trip calls and synching.

Across a large website, for example a big consumer brand, there can be an enormous volume of web tags connected to martech tools and third parties, and the main adtech vendors on the site. While a user sits on what appears to be an unresponsive website, page loads slow to a crawl - up to 10 seconds or even more - as calls are furiously exchanged and synced.

An imbalanced value exchange

The sheer volume of web tags synching and calling back and forth in JavaScript adds latency by requiring resources on the user's machine to provide data and share information back and forth. Depending on a number of factors, such as if the calls happen before or after content has been loaded, hidden web tags can impact overall site usability. When tags are running and content is not loading, the user has not derived value from the experience. They came to the site expecting to experience content, but they have yet to do so within three seconds most consumers expect. As a result, many consumers leave the site, never to return.

How to speed up your site by up to 25%

As a digital marketer, you should be able to identify:

• All of the first- and third-party JavaScript tags on your site
• What kind of resources the tags are calling
• What data the tags generally collect

• The impact of each tag on site performance

But, it's nearly impossible to manage all of this on your own without the right resources. Crownpeak's Trackermap and TagControl solutions were created to do all of this and more. Specifically, TagControl can measure the speed the latency of each particular vendor. By producing a list of the tags that are taking excessive time to collect and share information, TagControl provides the tools to pinpoint which web tags have a negative impact on the site. You can look up vendors with whom you're not familiar in TagControl's extensive database and disable unwanted tags.

In doing so, Crownpeak customers routinely experience site performance gains of 20-25%, and load times on specific pages dropping by up to 70%.

The foundation of trust

The job of web tags - collecting and sharing user data - is a flashpoint in today's heated social debate about online privacy, and the breach of trust that results from a data breach. Companies that properly manage web tags, and the data they collect, are well positioned to earn the trust of today's empowered consumers. For example, a recent study by Cognizant (1.8 MB) found that:

• "Privacy and security form the basis of trust. Nearly all respondents are concerned about privacy (91%), theft (76%), misuse of personal data (75%) and even physical safety (72%). In the great compromise between privacy/security and delivering personalized products and services, respondents greatly value the ethical compasses of the companies with which they do business.
• "Data can be yours as long as you ask clearly and keep your word. Transparency is the top factor (67%) affecting a company's trustworthiness. In fact, 45% of respondents are willing to share personal data if a company asks upfront and makes clear how the data will be used.
• "Show consumers a return on the value of their trust. About 66% of respondents view personal data as valuable and are willing to share it with companies in exchange for some form of value. This positive 'give-to-get' ratio is at the core of the economics of trust."

Finding and eliminating unwanted web tags rids your site of a primary source of page latency and sets the foundation for sustained, trust-based customer relationships. Get started today with a free scan that pinpoints hidden web tags.