Cyber Monday Winners and Losers: Part 2!

Digging Deeper Into Which Sites Cleaned Up, Sped Up, or Locked Down for Cyber Monday

It’s been a very busy week for us. Two posts last week (mine on Cyber Monday Winners and Losers, and fellow Ghosterian Mark Rudolph’s The Ghostery Holiday Naughty and Nice Tag List) stirred up a lot of interest, and some questions. Most of the feedback we got was “great stuff, thanks for making the point with data.” A few others asked us to go deeper, and felt we didn’t explain the whole story.

At Ghostery our primary focus is working with companies to ensure they are managing their marketing technology vendors effectively. When these vendor tags aren’t optimized and managed well, it hurts. At the same time, the stakes are high, and as Mark said best: “this stuff is not easy.”

In last week’s post, I looked at retailer websites where we saw changes in page latency, tag latency, and tag security between the pre-holiday and the holiday weeks. Based on the feedback we got, here’s a deeper dive into what we found from the 20 domains we studied:

Tag Proliferation vs. the Holiday Site Code Freeze Lock-Down

The saying goes: “If you’re not deployed by October 1, you probably aren’t getting on to the site for the rest of the year.” This annual end-of-year code freeze is almost like a rite of Fall. Or at least it used to be.

Entrepreneurs and technologists at the 20 domains studied figured ways to get around using container tags (e.g. DoubleClick Floodlight), Tag Managers (e.g. Tealium, Ensighten, Adobe Tag Manager) and DMPs (e.g. Blue Kai, Krux). This was a natural reaction to the vast growth in the number of different technologies a modern retail site relies upon, and the number of additional internal stakeholders (Security, Privacy, Business Analytics) and external stakeholders (Ad Agencies, System Integrators) who have wanted access to the site without having to run everything through IT. While this change has made a lot of processes easier, it’s also created more problems. In particular, the year-end code freeze really isn’t anything of the sort.

These new systems mean that instead of a lock-down, there’s a constant influx of new vendor tags, old tags that have been sunsetted, and tags that are being tested. There seems to be a lot of internal misalignment. Generally, there isn’t a single, enterprise-wide view that enables all the stakeholders to know what is being added or taken off, and where performance, security and privacy issues arise. This misalignment can be painful when issues hit.

Frequently, Ghostery clients come to us asking “if I’m in lock-down, how come I keep seeing more and more code on my pages?" Typically, this is because the number of third, fourth and fifth-party redirects has exploded. This frequently makes Tag Managers, Ad Agencies and Systems Integrators as confused and frustrated as the IT leaders! The ebbs and flows in the sheer number of tags on each site that we see from our Ghostrank panel data illustrates the magnitude of this problem. From the subset of 20 retailers we looked at in our last post, only three had no increase in new vendor tags (victoriassecret.com, journeys.com and bathandbodyworks.com). For the other sites, the minimum increase in the number of new vendor tags per site was 13%. The site with the largest increase, 44%, added 47 new tags (from 105 the week before to 152 the week of Cyber Monday)

How important is Tag Latency? It depends...

The nature and severity of slow vendor tags varies. The most savvy Website operators not only manage their tags from the perspective of which tags get added, they also spend time engineering the tags and placing them in such a way where they gain all the benefit from the tags, but minimize the risk of impacting users by slowing down the site. Tags that are customer-impacting are called SPOFs for “Single Points of Failure.” This means if they perform poorly, the entire site and user experience is compromised. The average number of SPOFs on the 20 sites in our study was 2, with a high of 6. So who’s most effective in managing their tags?

From the 20 retailers we looked at, only 2 are obviously in control of their tagging ecosystem. Victoria’s Secret and Quicksilver were the only site to have no SPOFs on their sites. What does that mean for those companies? Less time firefighting issues, more time selling, and a Happy Holiday! For the others? That means slow sites, more costs and less revenue.

If you want to learn more about what we’re up to @ghostery, please check out our recent press in TechRepublic and CIO.com. Follow us at @ghostery and @ghosteryinc.