Enhance the monitoring of your tagging plan by testing your dataLayer, analytics tags, and marketing tags.
To provide the best possible customer experience, it’s important to first and foremost understand how your users behave when they browse your website or app. But with a growing number of interactions—including login buttons, “Add to Cart” buttons, “Add to Favorites” buttons, search bars, calls to action, contact forms, and more—effectively tracking them is becoming increasingly complex. This is where the value of creating a tagging plan, also known as a tagging plan or data layer in web marketing jargon.
What is the marking plan?
A what? Let us quickly explain: if you want to track traffic to your website or app and analyze user interactions, you need to add tags. These tags, also known as markers, are tracking tags that take the form of snippets of code you add to a link. These tags are then used to track your users’ actions and journeys (which buttons they clicked and in what order) and collect data (where they came from).
And the tagging plan is simply a document that lists all the interactions you want to track using your web analytics tool, including details on how these tags are organized and implemented. In addition to improving the customer experience, the tagging plan also helps boost your performance, because the more you know about your users, the better you can tailor their journeys to their needs and satisfy them—and the more satisfied they are, the more likely you are to convert them.
But keep in mind: developing a tagging plan is all well and good, but there's no point in doing it if you don't remember to test your dataLayer regularly.
Why run dataLayer tests?
1. Monitor your production deployments
It’s important to verify that the tags you’ve implemented are firing correctly, that a dataLayer is present on all your pages, and that the collected data matches your tagging plan. By checking that your tags are working properly across your various environments, you can anticipate issues and ensure a smooth deployment. You can then launch your product with confidence (or at least, with some peace of mind)!
2. Optimize Your SEO
When you make changes to your website or app, it can sometimes affect your tags by accidentally overwriting or deleting them. And this has a direct impact on your SEO and, therefore, your visibility. To ensure you rank well in search engines, you should regularly test your tags, their triggers, and their values so you can correct any bugs as quickly as possible.
3. Ensure the reliability of your data
The whole point of implementing a tagging plan—or data layer—is to collect data about your users so you can then make the most informed decisions to optimize their conversion. But this requires that the data be collected properly and, above all, that you collect the right data. And the reliability of the data depends in large part on effective monitoring and maintenance, particularly through testing.
> Suri-tip: Instead of tearing your hair out by running manual dataLayer tests every time you deploy a new version—which can quickly become tedious and, above all, a real waste of time—consider automating them. Mr Suricate specifically added this new feature to let you automatically verify that your analytics events are being triggered.
FAQ
What is the marking plan?
A what? Let us explain briefly: if you want to track traffic to your website or app and analyze user interactions, you need to add tags. These tags, also known as markers, are tracking tags that take the form of snippets of code that you add to a link.
Why run dataLayer tests?
1. Monitor Your Production Deployments It is important to verify that the tags you have implemented are firing properly, that a dataLayer is present on all your pages, and that the collected data matches your tagging plan.
Further Reading
To see the solution in action, check out our data layer tests.
