DTM permissions and workflow
26 Apr 2015 » Launch
Some time ago, I received an urgent call from a customer that claimed that DTM broke their website. They wanted to see me immediately, as that was causing a huge impact in them. Fortunately, the problems only manifested in staging, but they could not move to production. Once I arrived at my client’s office, I immediately realised what had happened: the data analyst had created some data elements using JavaScript he found on the Internet and he just copied and pasted the code. The code worked on his computer, so he went to approve and publish it. The reality was that his code only worked in IE and crashed in other browsers.
As I have already explained, there are many benefits from using a tag management solution. However, with great power, comes great responsibility. Using DTM does not mean that marketers can implement anything they want and publish rules as they like. To the contrary, they must be very strict. The previous example is exactly the opposite of what must be done.
The solution I suggested to my client is to follow a very strict workflow and use wisely the permissions:
- Anybody who needs to create new rules should be given the User role. This allows the user to create new rules and make sure they work fine using the right DTM plugin.
- You need to have a group of testers that have the Approver role. They are responsible of making sure the new rules not only work fine in one browser, but they are cross-browser compatible, do not break the website, capture the expected data…
- Once the rules have been approved, it is time to publish them. Very few people should have the Publisher role and publishing rules should be done very carefully, just like a typical code release.
Some additional recommendations:
- Publish rules at a certain time every week, so that, in case something goes wrong, it is easy to identify that the new rules are the culprit and roll back to the previous approved version.
- Get some developer’s time in order to create JavaScript rules. He will probably need 5 minutes per rule and will do it right the first time.
- The testers, ideally, should be the same as the website testers, so that the tests are full tests, with the right tools and environment.