Top 10 Use Cases for TI’s Realtime Technology

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Tag Inspector is a tag auditing, governance, and monitoring platform used by organizations to surface tag insights about what data is being collected, what cookies are being set, and how each platform impacts a site’s overall load time. If you are unfamiliar with Tag Inspector, I would recommend starting with the articles linked. 

These technologies come standard with our Scanning technology. In addition, Tag Inspector has a second module, Tag Inspector Realtime. Simply put, Realtime is an always-on security system for your site providing on-going monitoring and alerting. Its purpose is to make sure that all tags/platforms/pixels are operating as expected, and if they aren’t, to send you alerts with custom rules and validations. 

With Realtime, you have the ability to create hundreds of different rules. To give you an idea of what is possible, we’ve compiled a list of the top ten most common rules created with our Realtime technology. 

1) Purchase Event 

Challenge: You are a retail company that sells clothing. Whenever someone purchases an article of clothing, your analytics team is notified that someone has purchased a product. You want to know when this occurs to keep track of your finances and to understand what products are being purchased the most.

Realtime Solution: The “Purchase Event” rule ensures you that when a user reaches an order confirmation page, the appropriate ‘purchase’ event is sent to analytics tracking. 

2) Checkout Event

Challenge: You are a news/media outlet, and can have a notification sent to your analytics platform indicating that someone is at the point that they are reviewing their subscription order before they hit the purchase button. You want to know when this occurs in case someone decides not to purchase, and figure out why that was.

Realtime Solution: The “Checkout Event” rule ensures that when a user reaches a specific stage of the checkout funnel, the appropriate ‘checkout’ event is sent to analytics tracking. 

3) PII Detection

Challenge: With online regulations i.e. GDPR, CCPA, etc. it’s more important now than ever to make sure that personal information is only happening under acceptable conditions, with violations leading to heavy fines. You need to make sure that your organization is meeting the online regulations and criteria for personally identifiable information (PII). 

Realtime Solution: This rule is to identify if PII is passed, unencrypted to a tag vendor. For example, Tag Inspector gives you the ability to determine if any personally identifiable information, such as a customer’s credit card number or email, is being collected by a 3rd party tag. 

To learn more about this technology, click the link here.

4) Add to (and remove from) Cart Event

Challenge: As a retailer, you want to know what items are being added/removed from carts to better understand what products are the most interacted with. This gives you an idea if you need to add more/less product to your inventory, and you want to make sure it is accurate. 

Realtime Solution: This “Add-to/Remove-from” rule is to ensure that when a button is clicked, or a data layer push occurs, the add to (or remove from) cart event is sent to analytics tracking.

5) Custom Dimensions and Events

Challenge: Not every data point you collect revolves around purchases or subscriptions. You could be looking for data points that are as simple as seeing when someone logs into your website or more granular such as tracking which day a customer subscribes to your site the most. Whatever the case is, you need to make sure that the information is being passed on to your analytics platform when the conditions are met.

Realtime Solution: The “Custom Dimensions & Events” rule is to ensure that any specific custom dimension is passing the appropriate value(s) when URL, dataLayer, and user action conditions are met.

6) Data Layer Structure

Challenge: As a refresher, a data layer is an object on a web page that organizes and holds relevant data to be collected and sent by 3rd party tags. It’s the key element between your site and your analytics tracking. For any page, you want to make sure that the dataLayer contains the necessary page, user, and interaction data to be leveraged by any tags implemented.

Without this information, you’re going to have a difficult time knowing who your most interested customers are and the top acquisition channels bringing them to your site.

Realtime Solution: This “Data Layer Structure” rule is to ensure that a data layer contains the proper structure, elements, and values on a specific site section(s) or page(s). 

7) Data Layer Pushes

Challenge: When customers interact with your site, relevant information about those interactions need to be “pushed” or added to the dataLayer. Let’s say someone clicks a product to view the details, that interaction along with context such as the product name, ID, and price needs to be added to the dataLayer so tags on the site can collect data for analytics. Without this data, analytics and advertising platforms can not serve their intended purpose.

Realtime Solution: This rule ensures that a data layer push occurs when a user performs a unique action such as clicking on a specific page element.

8) Tag Coverage

Challenge: The Google Universal Analytics tag is used to track and measure a user’s behavior on your site. To fully understand your customer’s journey, you need to know what pages they visit, and what they interact with for example. In order to get that info, the tag has to be on all pages.

If a tag is not on all pages, you won’t be able to understand how the user got from your site’s home page to the checkout page and, more importantly, how other users will do the same.

Realtime Solution: This rule is to ensure that tag X is being loaded on a defined set of pages. It’ll help verify that the tag of your choice is on the necessary pages to make sure your customer journeys are properly captured.

9) Page Parameters

Challenge: It’s important to know what tracking parameters are missing from page URLs. Query string parameters such as UTM parameters (for Google Analytics) or campaign IDs (for advertising platforms) provide critical campaign information used by third-party tags. Without these, we won’t have an idea of which campaigns are most effective or the sources of our traffic.

Realtime Solution: The “Page Parameters” rule helps you validate URLs for pages that are missing an expected value.

10) Browser Compatibility

Challenge: The latest version of Google Chrome isn’t the same as Safari or even earlier versions of Chrome. They each run differently and handle technical variations in different ways. For a given script, Chrome may handle it one way, but Safari may experience an error. As a result, this could lead to tags not operating properly and data not being tracked.

Realtime Solution: This rule is to ensure that production deployments do not break tags firing for a specific browser type. It goes through and checks if specific sections of a site work for all browser types and that all conditions are being met. 

These are just some examples among the vast number of rules you have the ability to generate within Tag Inspector. With each rule, you then have the ability to set up email alerts to notify you when any of the conditions aren’t met and need to be fixed. Our team will be working alongside you to make this an easy process to set up and execute.

Every business has goals and ideas of what they want to collect and analyze established ahead of time. The rules mentioned above can have their own twist tailored to each use case. If this is new ground for you and you don’t know where to start, these 10 rules should help give you a push in the right direction.

Interested in learning more? Click here to watch our webinar on the differences between Realtime and our Scanner. Additionally, you can contact us at ti-contactus@taginspector.com to see if Realtime is the best fit for you and your team.

Originally Published On May 7, 2020
October 8, 2020