Policies like the EU Privacy Directive, (effective in the U.K. from this Saturday, May 26th), and U.S. Do-Not-Track related bills are swiftly gaining traction. Companies and online marketers will be under a microscope to ensure they are respecting consumers’ tracking wishes and keeping their personal information protected. They will now have to work closely with third party tracking vendors to ensure the right tags are being added, removed, and managed in compliance with these new laws and regulations.
The real question is, do marketers truly understand the impact tags and tracking tools on their webpage will have on their brand and compliance with privacy laws? Moreover, do consumers understand what cookies and tracking tools they’re encountering each time they visit a company’s site? TagMan has teamed up with Evidon’s browser privacy platform Ghostery, which collects data on over 10 million unique U.S. domains running third party tracking services, and found that the majority of the sites have between 1 and 5 third party tags on their site. The average number of tracker tags per site was 4.7.
These numbers tell us that not only do companies have a lot of third party tags on their sites, but the majority of them are from third party tracking vendors. Across the 10 million sites, a lot of the average is made up of ‘long tail’ small sites who have few tags; the real story is in the 19% who have more than 6 tags and are likely to be larger, enterprise sites, as we know from experience. It also makes clear the importance for the marketers at these companies to work closely with their tracking vendors to ensure their customers know what information is being collected and how it is being used.
With the advancement and growth of tracking technologies and the new legislation, it’s now more important than ever to be proactive about ePrivacy compliance – starting with completely understanding your third party tracking tags. Tag management puts the control of tags back into the marketers hands and makes it easy to manage do-not-track requirements across their websites.
