Ghostery’s data governance solutions ensure your marketing tag data is managed correctly
and no data is being leaked to competitors.

Here are a few of the concerns we heard at a recent vendor management workshop:

“Setting pixels on your site is like introducing a Trojan Horse”

“Once you let a third party onto your site, they can do whatever they want”

These people are onto something. In fact, it’s estimated that 80% of the digital vendors on a brand’s site are placed there indirectly. This puts WebOps departments in a predicament as these unmanaged tags inevitably end up slowing down the website and putting data at risk. Building a strong program to manage customer data is one way WebOps can take control of this chaos and work cooperatively across the organization with other departments to ensure the website is running at full speed and free of vulnerabilities.

What is Data Governance?

Put simply, data governance is the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data being used at an organization. A data governance program should include a council made up of both business owners and IT, a defined set of processes and a plan to execute those processes and when done right, it ensures that data can be trusted and that the right people are held accountable when there are problems.

While a data governance initiative can address a number of objectives - including regulatory changes (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley), operational improvements, or eliminating redundancies, it can be particularly helpful when it comes to mitigating the problems created by unmanaged marketing technologies. As stated above, many times the marketing technology tags placed on a site call other tags. These indirect “piggyback” tags can pass customer data along, potentially to competitors, unbeknownst to anyone at the organization.  A well-managed program, where clear ownership of these tags and the data that they pass, will eliminate this potential problem.