Tag Management Migration Boosts Efficiency and Security for L&G

Using the right tag management system (TMS) is a key step for any organisation’s data management and provides a solid foundation for successful data collection. These systems allow businesses to successfully implement, manage and maintain tags which help provide behavioural and marketing analytics on digital properties such as websites and apps. Multinational financial services firm Legal & General engaged Station10 to migrate their existing TMS implementation to Adobe Launch across their entire organisation. Station10 were given a deadline, by which they needed to move away from their existing TMS platform. We had to effectively plan this migration across over 70 digital properties which included over 500 tags. It was important to pay careful attention to the fact that we were working across a federated business model – different parts of the organisation had their own web technology and were managed by different development agencies which created its own challenges.

Choosing the Right Tool

We worked with L&G before the project to understand the needs and demands of the organisation. We converted that into a set of requirements for a tool to be effectively selected. We then did a marketplace analysis looking at all of the significant vendors in the TMS space. Following this, we provided L&G with our thoughts and recommendations as to how these tools align with their needs. After this extensive research, we were able to work with the client to help select the next TMS solution that would best meet their requirements. During the selection process, we identified Adobe Launch as the tool the best fit the needs of the client.

The Initial Audit

After our initial consultative work, the first step in delivery was performing an in-depth audit. First, we took L&G’s complex site architecture and divided up each business unit to understand the tag requirements for each part of the site. This was different for standard webpages, landing pages, and product application pages. It was also important to scope the existing TMS solution to get to grips with any potential issues that could stop the migration being successful. We then performed stakeholder interviews to understand the business context and demand of the relevant tags that have been identified.

Once we had fully understood the existing solution and had an in-depth knowledge of each business unit’s digital properties, we went one step deeper to understand the tags themselves. Our work showed that there were 100s of tags that were live but redundant i.e. not working correctly, accurately or capturing the correct data. To make sure that the same problems and inefficiencies didn’t become an issue on the new platform, we noted every redundant tag to ensure they weren’t migrated to the new platform.

As we’d worked with L&G extensively and understood their business, we knew the existing TMS solution was struggling to keep up with the growing complexity of data across the organisation. Initially, we were engaged purely to complete the migration, but owing to our consultative approach and knowledge of the business, we were able to suggest a range of improvements to L&G’s tag structure and governance.

The Reimplementation

Once we had rooted out redundant tags, we were left with relevant tags that were vital for measuring customer behaviour and commercial performance. This included behavioural and marketing analytics as well as functional scripts. We made an assessment of each script to check whether there would be any compatibility issues with the new TMS system. In some cases, workarounds were needed in order to make the scripts and tags work. Additionally, we found an opportunity to enhance the documentation of the 70 sites we were working with regarding the tags that had been deployed and what data they were collecting. With this in mind, we built 70+ Solution Design Reference (SDR) documents, which acted as a blueprint for deploying tags on the new TMS platform. When this documentation was ready, we worked in sprints to reimplement tags in Adobe Launch. Then, finally, before releasing in a live environment, we provided extensive testing across 5 different browsers and ratified all data which was going to be released.

Business Benefits

As a result of the migration to Adobe Launch, Legal & General ended up with the following business benefits;

An increase in efficiency and reduction in effort needed when making amendments or appendments to the analytics and marketing tags via the TMs due to the streamlined implementation.
A more robust and secure process for tag management, reducing the risks associated with this activity and function.
A reduction in the number of post-release issues experienced by migrating from a single code base to a federated code base (aligned with the organisation’s federated business units) preventing changes from one business unit impacting the data collection from another.
Increased standardisation of code across the federated code base, leading to an increase in accuracy and reduction in effort to bring code to live environments.

Overall, we delivered on the client’s requirements for the migration and provided scalability for the client’s needs which added additional security and governance around the data being collected.

Tag Management Migration Boosts Efficiency and Security for L&G