By implementing Google Tag Manager on over 160 desktop and 20 mobile sites, Regus standardised tagging globally and drove big gains in efficiency and insights.
THE GOALS
Implement new tags and tag changes faster
Reduce developer hours spent on tagging
Improve insights and optimisations
THE APPROACH
Adopted Google Tag Manager
Standardised tagging across all online assets
Encompassed 160+ desktop sites, 20+ mobile sites, thousands of offsite pay-per-click pages, hundreds of marketing landing pages and more
THE RESULTS
Reduced time to manage tags from months to hours
Streamlined implementation of Remarketing Lists for Search Ads across 110 web properties, decreasing cost per acquisition by 25% in some countries
Facilitated introduction of Google Call Metrics tags, enabling better understanding of return on investment
The complexity of Regus’ online portfolio meant that tagging was becoming a burden.
Each new tag or change to an existing tag took significant time and resource.
“We had to write a detailed change request, provide code, wait for weeks to get a release date, move into testing phase and then the tag eventually got released onto the site,” explains Regus Group Online Commercial Director Guy Hancox.
“This meant that getting any new insights on site behaviour regularly took over two months, and wasted valuable technical resource which could have been better employed in improving the site.”
Google Tag Manager to the rescue
With 2,000 centres in 750 cities, Regus is the world’s largest provider of flexible workspaces. It has over 160 websites across the globe and maintains thousands of campaign-specific landing pages in 40 languages. In common with many large businesses, Regus places tags – tiny bits of web code – on its site pages in order to measure traffic and visitor behaviour, understand the impact of marketing activities and test and improve its sites.
The marketing team wanted not to have to depend on the development team or have to wait for releases to implement tags. The ideal solution would be one that was free, universally available and compatible with third-party tags. After reviewing the options, Regus chose to implement Google Tag Manager. “It’s the most widely used tag management system and therefore all our suppliers’ tags are engineered to work in it, plus it seamlessly integrates with all the other Google products we use,” says Marketing Web Analyst Dimitri Terhout.
Google Tag Manager has now been deployed on all of Regus’ online assets, which include more than 160 desktop sites, over 20 mobile sites, thousands of offsite pay-per-click pages, hundreds of marketing landing pages and more. “Implementing Google Tag Manager was very easy,” he says. “A single unit of code simply had to be copied on every page of our sites, which was done by our dev team.”
Following minimal training from Google, the marketing team quickly got to grips with the intuitive tool and put it straight to work. Today, rather than filing ticket after ticket with IT, the team manages all tags from the Google Tag Manager web interface and can deploy tags independently. While previously a tag implementation involved a developer, a marketer and a user acceptance tester, the task now takes just one person one hour to complete.
“This underpins an extensive optimisation program across all our major markets and all our platforms,” Dimitri explains. “We are able to activate, amend or delete any of these on the same day, and deliver instant information on all testing around the world to a large volume of internal clients.”
The bottom line, the bigger picture
With Google Tag Manager, Regus is optimally equipped to measure advertising performance, which is already having a tangible impact on the business. “Prior to Google Tag Manager, we struggled to provide our optimisation program with the speed of turnaround that we needed, as there were frequent delays while we waited for new tags or amendments to tags to be implemented to the site. The cost in time was a cost in money,” Guy explains. “Globally, leads contribute millions of pounds per year, hence every additional 0.1% conversion has a massive impact to our bottom line. Every month earlier that we can deliver improvement contributes extra revenue to the business.”
The Regus team now knows they can compare data for all of their global sites accurately, as they know the analytics implementations are in line and of high quality. The benefits don’t end there though. In order to pull offline data into its analytics Regus recently upgraded from Google Analytics to Universal Analytics, a move that was easier thanks to Google Tag Manager. The new simplified tagging process also made it easy for the company to implement remarketing tags. Now Regus uses Remarketing Lists for Search Ads across 110 of its web properties, contributing to a decrease in cost per acquisition of 25% in some countries. Finally, Regus is now using Google Call Metrics. Phone calls generated from website visits were never tracked properly before, but a simple tag deployed via Google Tag Manager now makes this possible. Overall, better and easier tagging gives Regus a much fuller picture of the impact of its advertising activities, which in turn drives optimisations and future success.
