The closet near our front door, if excavated, would reveal years of family activities, sports, outerwear fashions, and hordes of forgotten treasures. I fantasise about the Saturday when I dive in and clear out its contents, emptying it of everything except my favourite items. But I can’t. Everyone in my family uses this closet and, buried amidst forgotten items, are key objects that enable our daily schedules. I need a regular process where we come together and decide how the closet should function, and what it should contain.
Your website is like my closet. In fact, you no longer have a website. You have an accumulation of marketing technologies that, in many cases, are made up of hundreds of vendors. Each of which has, or does, help you with marketing, analytics, security, optimisation or data storage. The average top commercial site now contains over 70 distinct companies, each of which potentially has access to customer information. Like my closet, the vendors have been added over time by various individuals or groups within your organisation and without a process in place to regularly evaluate which should be used, how they are performing, and if their value proposition outweighs the risks inherent in their use.
The monitoring and control over the technologies in your marketing cloud is the new discipline of marketing cloud management. Enterprises that succeed in managing their vendors stand to improve their site latency, increase conversions, stem the flow of data leakage, and protect customer privacy.
To achieve these results, enterprises need to enact a series of steps. First, they need to decide which department is going to own vendor management and staff that area appropriately. Due to the novel need created by tag complexity, our clients have assigned this responsibility to various departments that include the media team, the web or ad ops teams, and even the privacy team. Regardless of who is tasked with managing tag strategy, the effort requires departments to gather regularly so that each can voice its vendor concerns, have input in establishing how vendors are considered, and share overall goals for marketing results and site performance.
The monitoring and control over the technologies in your marketing cloud is the new discipline of marketing cloud management. Enterprises that succeed in managing their vendors stand to improve their site latency, increase conversions, stem the flow of data leakage, and protect customer privacy.
Once this structure is in place and a process has been established for vendor consideration through vetting and implementation, it is then important to audit all websites, applications, and other digital platforms to see which vendors are found on each and any other companies they are subsequently bringing with them through redirect chains.
Often, a vendor will place a tag on an enterprise’s site with the understanding that it calls out to a small list of partners in order to deliver on its marketing promise. However, frequently and often unbeknownst to the vendor, other companies are brought in through unknown relationships. Each of these companies has access to customer data, a risk that can only be mitigated when enterprises know who these companies are and what function they serve.
The audit is not a one-time affair: monitoring, ideally with alerts that notify when violations of whitelists or blacklists have occurred, or even a missing tag need to happen on a regular basis. The audit and alert results are then compared with vendor strategy, and any companies found that are unknown, redundant, or who do not meet SLA standards are assessed by the vendor strategy manager and team. Reaching out to vendors who are unknown or performing poorly on websites can be challenging, and it helps to have a set of criteria in place, such as an agreed-upon SLA, so that vendors know what an enterprise expects. These agreements will also serve as a guide for evaluating new vendors.
Implementing these steps may require some change in process or responsibility, but the benefits far outweigh the effort. Nicole Keiter, of Equifax, recently spoke about how their vendor management efforts, summarised in the steps listed above, were of great value to their brand: “Keeping the promise to consumers that their data will not be passed on, utilised, or re-directed. I think that’s an unset rule. We’re working to keep that promise to consumers.”
Any first steps towards better vendor management will yield results. Enterprises who commit to marketing cloud management will increase revenue, decrease costs, and protect their brand loyalty. Start today from whichever department makes sense, begin to outline the above, and watch the process create a culture of data governance shared across departments.
