Overview

Tealium is an entreprise grade tag management solution offering a way to manage operations done through tags on 4 main axis, data layer, load rules, tags and extensions.

DataLayer

Tealium is setup around a concept of data layer and of a utag_data javascript object. The utag_data object is a dictionary object that contains all the different javascript variables to be used by the tag managed. Within Tealium’s nomenclature this object is called the universal data object (UDO).

Checking the utag_data object in your browser console should display all the relevant variables for use.

Within Tealium these can be mapped to a universal name to be used within the tag management system for integration in different types of tags.

Beside the data setup within the UDO (utag_data) Tealium is also able to map other type of data into the data layer, such as query string parameters (?utm_campaign=mycampaign for instance) , first party cookie, information extracted from the html code, other javascript variables …

Events

The Utag.Link function should be used to generate a specific event to fire while Utag.View should only be used for page tracking. Utag Links allow to send events with informations provided within a dictionary nested in the Utag.Link function ie( Utag.link({‘key’: ‘ value}) ).

Load rules

Load rules provides sets of conditions that can be setup to decide if different tags need to be fired. They can use the different variables setup within the data layer to establish if the condition has been passed.

The addition of load rules can make use of different types of condition across variables (AND/OR) as well as different condition types.

Tags

Once the datalayer and the load rules conditions have been setup it is possible to add different tags on Tealium.

Tealium offers a marketplace of already pre-built tags but also allows for the addition of custom javascript tags.

The above screenshot for instance showcases an already setup Google Analytics tags. The tags itself contains three areas of interest: Tag Configuration, Load rules and Mapped variables.

The configuration provides a couple of input as to how the tag should behave. While the load rules would put a set of condition as when would the tag be active. In the above example, the condition is to have the tag active on all pages. The mapped variables constitutes a mapping process similar to the one needed for the data layer, but in this case, the mapping occurs between the data layer and the tags’ variables.

Extensions

Another feature of tealiums are extensions, they allow different operation to be done, fetching new data to populate the data layer, persisting data, combining variables, cleaning or standardizing variables, create events … or just load some plain javascript on the website.

Tealium offers a combination of data/variables operation extensions as well as some more advanced offers. Some of the offering are more business focus, such as offering split segmentation for AB testing purposes for instance, or overlaying a promotion modal

One of the extensions offered by Tealium is the e-commerce extension, which enables the mapping of variables in tags such as Google Analytics Mentioned before.

A more custom extension is one setup as a Javascript code, which allows to run any Javascript code on the website provided it is matching a load condition.

Tealium tools

Tealium offers a webcompanion for chrome to simplify certain operations on the website. It allows to see the different tags and extensions being loaded on the website at different point in time, to switch between the different environment (DEV, QA and Prod) as well as offer some management of the datalayer with a visual editor. It is quite helpful as well to understand if you changes have been propagated and are available for testing/QA.

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