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Lesson Overview
This comprehensive course covers everything you will need to become a Manage power user - from deploying tags, data layers and event tracking to organizing your TMS strategy and properly QA and troubleshoot.
Learners should have a basic grasp of client-side web technologies.
Transcription
Welcome back to "Ensighten Manage Training Series." In this video, we'll be covering a deep dive on how the tags on your page got there and what they're doing. We'll dig into topics like the tag delivery network, and why the tags are delivered to the page in a very specific way.
Let's start off with the Tag Delivery Network or TDN. Our servers are cloud-hosted with full global coverage and extremely reliable uptime. On the rare occasion that an outage occurs, it has historically been a major service provider issue that's outside of our control. The TDN is what delivers your bootstrap and subsequently, it tags to the page. When the request leaves your page, it heads off to our service in the TDN and returns with the bootstrap's contents.
Bootstrap sets up our libraries on the page and collects them under the bootstrapper object on the window level. If you have other products that function synchronously, such as privacy, these will then begin their execution, as well any other tags using asynchronous condition set up. Finally, the bootstrap will construct a request for the server component. This server component is the connection between your synchronous and asynchronous tagging, and what connects with the conditions you'll be setting on your tag. The server component carries the full URL of the page back to the TDN, and when it returns, the contents are a list of all tag files that should be served to the page based on condition matching the server components data.
Bootstrap requests those files. The async code files are loaded to the page and your tags begin asynchronous execution. This method of tag delivery is fairly unique in the TMS space. Most tag managers use what's called a container tag system instead of a server-side TDN style approach. A container tag system creates one large bucket of all possible tags that could be delivered to a website and downloads all of it to the page. Once it's on the page, it has to decide if any of those tags actually need to run or if they were simply wasted space.
In large accounts that's been multiple websites, this could mean you're downloading 1,000 tags so that you can run 10. And not only did you download those extra 990 tags, you also had to run decisioning logic just to be sure you didn't need to execute them. The TDN is only delivering tags to the page that have been conditioned such that they need to be present on that page. That's capable of synchronous execution for products and vendors requiring it, and it's not wasting cycles on processing large volumes of tags that may never execute.
That's all for this training video. Thanks for viewing and look forward to our next video on Space and Bootstrap Architecture.