Notice the similarities? That's because tag management is relatively standardized across platforms. The nomenclature changes, but the core is the same. The tag manager code that you install in the header of your application contains JavaScript. That JavaScript is used to insert something called a dataLayer. The marketer or analyst then creates tags that contain other small bits of JavaScript that interact with the dataLayer.

These tags can be built-in analytics tags that allow you to send data to your analytics platform, 3rd-Party tags that allow you to send data from your application to an outside platform, or custom tags that allow you to insert HTML, CSS, and JavaScript onto a page of your application.

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Each tag requires some rule based trigger to know when to execute its code on the page. These rules can be simple or complex depending on the data you need to collect. For instance, I frequently set rules that look something like this:
 

• Page URL contains domainA

• Page URL contains products

• Product Query String parameter =  shoe123

• Affiliate Referral Cookie = zappos

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This rule allows a tag to initiate for a web page that has the tag manager code installed and has a URL that looks something like https://www.exampledomainA.com/products/?Product=shoe123

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The tag will only initiate under those conditions and when a cookie that your domain records called "Affiliate Referral" equals "zappos."

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As you can see the rules can get very specific and can be based on 1000's of variables like Page URL, Browser Cookies, DOM Elements interacted with, Link Clicks, Form Submissions, Scroll Depth, Time spent on a page, javascript variables, and even custom events that get "pushed" into the dataLayer when a back end function of your application completes.

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