Unless you are the smallest of small businesses or have an extraordinarily simple website and deployment, you need a robust data governance solution, also known as a tag auditing solution.
What Is a Data Governance Solution?
Data governance is a widely used term, referring to a lot of different types of activities and data formats. The context in which we use it here is to refer to the governance of digital analytics data, specifically regarding the testing of analytics and marketing tags. A data governance solution hence performs tag auditing.
Designed to audit your entire website to confirm the presence (or absence) of various data collection solutions (known as tags or website tags), the best auditing solutions on the market today take scanning a step further, testing your tags and analytics variables against predefined rules and notifying you of any failed tests.
Given that digital marketing and analytics tools are only as good as the data they process, a tag auditing solution can be the difference between having mediocre data and having accurate, actionable, and trustworthy data. According to Tim Munsell from DaveRamsey.com, “Having a tag auditing solution has improved how we go about tagging our pages and how we think about what we are tracking and why.”
Measuring and Improving Data Quality
Especially in complex environments where content changes frequently or a large number of employees are deploying content, the likelihood that your data steward can oversee data collection without a tag auditing solution is quite low. Given the relatively low cost of currently available auditing solutions compared against the value of having trustworthy data, tag auditing solutions shouldn’t be considered a “nice-to-have.”
So to recap, you need a data governance solution that provides you with accurate, actionable, trustworthy data that actually means something and enables you to make the most informed digital marketing decisions possible.
This post is based on the white paper Data Quality and the Digital World by Eric T. Peterson, principal consultant at Web Analytics Demystified.
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