Data governance has become a hot topic in today’s privacy and regulatory environment. Now, more than ever, organizations must know what platforms are collecting information from their website users, what data is being collected, and with whom it is being shared. Providing this level of transparency is a requirement for both the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
At first, this identification can seem like a fairly straightforward task. Just take inventory of the platforms your organization is using by asking internal teams what is being leveraged… right?
The short answer: Wrong.
The digital marketing and advertising technology ecosystem is far too complicated for this simple approach. Many of the platforms you have implemented on your site will be piggybacking, or loading in, additional third-party platforms that you likely have no visibility to. Take the below as an example:
This is a visual of the tag-loading behavior from a popular publishing website. A majority of the organizations we work with have no idea about the platforms being piggybacked and loaded in this manner.
And that’s where Tag Inspector comes in.
When running a scan with Tag Inspector, we are recording all network requests sent by the various tags and pixels loading on your website. This includes those third parties that are piggybacking or loading through other platforms you have implemented.
The real power here, however, lies in Tag Inspector’s Tag Library.
Our library of tags and pixels has an industry-leading 2,200+ unique platforms classified. This means that we can take the raw network request (for example something like this:
… and then display what that platform is in an understandable format (in this case, BlueKai, which is a data management platform).
These library classifications are updated in every Tag Inspector release to account for platform name changes, industry mergers and acquisitions, as well as to add new technologies as we become aware of them. Don’t see a platform that you are aware of? We’d love to hear about it. Contact us here and we will get it classified ASAP.
So, what does this mean for you?
Leveraging the Tag Inspector technology and our industry-leading Tag Library allows you full visibility into all of the platforms loading and collecting data on your users. You can use this information to conduct tag governance audits for purposes of CCPA and GDPR, monitor against your defined Tag Governance Policy to identify unauthorized tags, and generally get insight into all tags loading on your site(s).
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