Tag Management: The Glue that Brings IT and Marketing Together

#agility2016

Tag Management: The Glue that Brings IT and Marketing Together

Ryan BurkeStaff Software Engineer

Keith AshornSoftware Engineer

#agility2016

About HomeAway

• Founded in 2005, HomeAway is the leading online marketplace for vacation rentals

• More than 1.2 million listings of entire vacation homes in 193 countries

• Acquired more than 20 vacation rental companies, including VRBO.com and VacationRentals.com

• Based in Austin, TX, with more than 2,000 employees globally

• Acquired by Expedia in 20152

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About Ryan and Keith

Ryan Burke• Graduated from Texas State

in 2004• Joined HomeAway in April

2014• Enjoys ping pong, the cello,

and calling Keith a “90s baby”

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Keith Ashorn• Graduated from UT Austin in

2014 and joined HomeAway just after

• Loves basketball and playing the drums

• Answers to “younger Ryan”

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WHERE WE STARTED

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Scope of Tagging at HomeAway

Over 30 Different Domains

2 Dozen Different Tag Vendors

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Organizational

• Marketing owned tagging implementation• There were 2 developers who reported up through Marketing

Org• Developers had no ties to Engineering Org

• This meant velocity often won over scalability, stability, and performance

• No backing from Engineering Org• Engineering Org had little insight into tags on the site or when they

were updated• This led to surprise when things would break

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Large Backlog of Tagging Requests

• Slowed the rollout of marketing campaigns• Limited the ability of campaigns to perform as effectively as

possible• Increased the need for higher and higher development

velocity

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No Quality Assurance (QA) Testing

• Tagging traditionally doesn’t get the same QA attention as product code

• Production outages due to bugs in our code• Any site downtime means lost revenue

• Regressions of previously fixed issues• No formal release/change log to clearly

identify what caused an issue• Tagging bugs led to data loss

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WHERE WE COULD IMPROVE

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QA/Release Process

Ideas: What Could We Do Better?

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Engineering Process

Communication

Tagging Platform

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WHAT WE’VE DONE

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Where does Tag Management fit in?CRM

updates

(bookings, not booking requests)

Desktop MobileApp

Traffi c

Ad Server

Homeaway Datawarehouse

Web

site

& M

obile

Da

ta

Colle

ctio

n

Data driven optimisation with ROI reporting

NormalisedData Feed

Normalised Data Feed

Campaign evaluation and attribution

Creative Delivery & Optimization, Viewability and Brand Safety

Post impression Post click Post conversionPPC

AffiliatesPaid Social

Remarketing

GDNData-driven Display (DSP)

Ensighten Manage 2.0Tagging Events

Data provided through Vendor Tagging

Interaction and Customer

Data Collection

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Manage 2.0 Migration

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Features

Data Layer Definitions Apps Advanced

ConditionsSpaces

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Weekly Sprint Planning

• All requestors present• Decide on list of prioritized requests among all stakeholders

• Priority order based on business impact • Additional priority given to critical initiatives

• Once implemented, requestors verify with vendors that tags work as expected

• Only one 30 minute meeting per week

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The Motto

Tags are CODE running on our production website.

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Tags Are Code

• Tag Management team now part of Engineering

• Dedicated QA team member• Standard release process• Test/stage/production environments

for development and testing• Source control for custom code

• With unit tests!

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Benefits Already

> 1 yearSince a tagging-

related production outage

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100%Unit test coverage

on custom JavaScript code

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WHERE WE’RE GOING

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What’s Next

• Educate marketing users on how to use the features of Manage 2.0

• Enable marketers to create a tag (using Manage’s Apps) and deploy to test environment

• Help stakeholders track changes to their tags• Allow them to easily see what/where/when tags are

fired19

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THANK YOU

RYAN BURKEStaff Software Engineer,

HomeAway

KEITH ASHORNSoftware Engineer, HomeAway