Thank you for the kind words. Shoot me your mailing address (jasonb at zaaz dot com) and I will have a copy mailed to you.

Jason

On the other hand, of what I see from our stand point as an Agency (and I really don’t like that word because we don’t consider ourselves as a “beauty contest” or “branding” agency but more a ROI agency as technically speaking, we build our own solutions – OniSystem, the eMarketing platform and OniPortal, which includes SDKs) is that tagging goes a lot faster with our own tools: I talk to IT, I need such and so and they are happy to help out or it’s already imbedded into our own systems.
When other parties get involved, either they are good technically as Jean-Marc points out and we can work together on issues such as (gradual) automatic tagging or, it takes ages, the work is sloppy and it’s not ideal because we lack half of the mentioned code.

So, in response to your conspiracy theory, yes, I am aware of the fact that independent audit is the ideal solution but for the moment, technical knowledge related to (certainly automatic) tagging is not really out there, unfortunately.

Add to that that between vendors, we are not really seeing true standardisation efforts (which would be in the interest to the entire sector) and you end up with natural barriers to entry – and to switching solutions – in this discipline.

I hope that within a near future, it will become almost natural to tag (but I fear we might move over to something else) and that I won’t need to interfere with that technical part anymore, taking full advantage of my analytical skills in order to influence strategy.

To Jean-Marc:
Oh, I can relate very well to what you mention!
I remember a Dutch public sector project some years ago where the pages were tagged but the Web Analytics partner did not bother to take a look at the WCMS so all new pages that were created after the WA project did not include even the basic tags.
Imagine the look of horror on this prospects’ face once we pointed out that, after having used a basic crawler, we wondered why only half the site was adequately tagged.

The thing is, as I mentioned, we are not your “classical” branding agency as we come from a fairly strong technical background as we still build our own content management systems, one in .NET and the later in CFM (I know, there is still some debate about the technology but we like it and with the advent of Flex & Flash, to us, it’s of interest but I can understand a possible grin on your face).

It’s therefore part of our Web Analytics services to sit down with IT or the integration partner and discuss a gradual roadmap of automatic tagging. Gradual because you have to walk before you can run, starting with the basic tagging and gradually adding more specific data capture methods as demands in terms of reporting also become more specific from a business perspective. Sometimes it’s also a mater of defining what goes where (templates for example) but some custom developments are also needed on certain pages so WCMS sometimes go as far as allowing content creators to manually add tags. There’s off course also the issue of Web 2.0 tagging, Flash tagging and the recent, slow but certain, abandonment of page views to move towards events.

That’s where it becomes a continuous process where a beta version should include tags and be tested to make sure it feeds the chosen WA tool before the page/content actually hits the online world officially, as metrics and statistical requirements should be included within any project and should not be looked at as an ad-hoc exercise.
Ouch, that was a long phrase, my apologies.
Some of this tagging should come from the WCMS, some might not (integrated Flash files for examples with Call2Action buttons) and this should be defined within a process as my friend Eric likes to point out.

I hope I’ve answered your questions/remarks and made sense. Looking forward to your thoughts.

kind regards,
Aurelie

I am reading your blog for few months now and I decide to react on this post for 2 main reasons.
The first one is that this is the first time I see a post in all the blogs I read almost everyday talking about the significant impact and difficulty in tagging a web site. Reading the experiences of great people like Avinash or Peter, it seems to me that implementing the tags are a secondary problem of a Web Analytics project. Not a problem it is worth to talk about it because a technical issue and then, it can be solved by technical people.
From my experiences, the internal IT processes to update a web site were always the biggest issue in the Web Analytics projects.

The second reason is that I had a similar experience about the difficulties to work with certain Interactive Agencies.
I work for an IT company which -among other stuff- is implementing web sites. I really insist on the fact that we are an IT company acting also in the Web and not “only” an Interactive Agency.
Thanks to several opportunities, we have started to develop a quite good knowledge in Web Analytics (even if we are still beginners) and I had to work on the implementation of tags for a web site according to the recommendations of an Interactive Agency positioned as Web Analytics specialists.
We were really surprised when we received the documentation with the recommendations of tags to implement. The site is based on a CMS tool and have a significant amount of pages generated dynamically, and the recommendations were nothing else than a list of URLs with the name and value of tags for each.
???
What about the new pages ?
Is there any logic for the name of this tag in that section?
What if there is a new sub-section?…

When we asked about more generic rules to implement a smart automatic tagging, it was quite impossible to find somebody to talk to understanding what we were talking about.
It took 2 months before arriving to a satisfactory agreement and we finally wrote the documentation of implementation and asked the Interactive
Agency to validate that the way we wanted to implement the tags was what they expected.
And finally, the Customer paid twice for the same work…

That’s why I like the idea of interactive agencies that also do web analytics.

Then again, a buyer may want to have a third party revise measurement sometimes.