How to tag a website

Tagging doesn't start with the technical part; it starts with planning. Before you start tagging things, you need to define what makes sense to measure, and this comes from objectives: which actions are important to track for business decisions? A tagging plan lists the actions to measure (visits, important clicks, forms, purchases, etc.) in alignment with what truly matters. This planning avoids both measuring too little (and losing important data) and measuring too much (and creating disorder).

With the plan in hand, the next step is to define the events (the actions to be recorded) and, especially, the conversions (the most valuable actions, such as a purchase or a lead). Marking conversions well is the most important part because they connect on-site behavior to business results. It's crucial to clearly identify what counts as a conversion and ensure these actions are measured correctly. This is the most valuable data that tagging will collect.

In practice, Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the tool that facilitates tagging implementation. With it, you can configure the tags that record the events defined in your plan, without having to directly edit the site's code for every change. GTM organizes and centralizes these tags, making implementation quicker and more controllable. Still, configuring tags correctly requires technical knowledge to ensure each action is measured properly.

A step that many people skip, and shouldn't, is validation. After implementing the tags, it's essential to test and verify that everything is working and measuring correctly before trusting the data. A misconfigured tag can record incorrect, duplicate, or no data at all, compromising the entire analysis. Validating means checking if each event is being captured as it should. Only after confirming that data collection is accurate can you trust the numbers to make decisions.

Tagging collects data, but it needs to reach analytics tools to be useful. Therefore, part of the job is to ensure the integration between tagging and the tools where the data will be analyzed, such as analytics platforms. When this connection is well-made, the collected data flows correctly to where it will be organized, visualized, and transformed into insights. This closes the loop between collecting and using data.

Tagging is not a one-and-done task. Websites change, new pages and functionalities emerge, objectives evolve, and tagging needs to keep up. A website that changes without updating its tagging will start collecting incomplete or incorrect data without anyone noticing. Therefore, periodically reviewing and maintaining tagging is essential for the data foundation to remain reliable over time. Tagging is ongoing care, not a one-time event.