Back in October, Google announced the launch of Tag Manager, a tool that lets you consolidsate the various tags you use for your site into one snippet of code and manage from one interface.
Since then, Google has made some improvements including built-in templates for popular tags. At Google I/O in May, Google announced that it would work with mobile apps.
Google announced today that it is serving twice the amount of traffic that it was in April, as a “significant’ number of large advertisers have signed on.
But the real news is that a consortium of companies has introduced a new standard Data Layer, which is a core component of Tag Manager.
Google talked a bit about the consortium, which includes IBM, Accenture, the W3C and others, in a blog post today.
“It’s a standard way to format data within a web page,” Google says of the new data standard. “Think of the data layer as a central way for analytics and marketing tools to communicate and share data on a web page.”
“It’s typically used in two ways,” Google says. “1. to store data and provide a clear separation between the data and presentation layer of the page and 2. to store data when some type of user activity occurs. The information in the data layer can then be consumed by different web technologies, like analytics tools or marketing tools, through a tag management platform.”
Google voiced its support of the effort to standardize the format and syntax, though, as the company says, “Standards cannot exist in a vacuum. They need adoption.”
