At this link, Akin Arikan puts forth some great discussion of the Data Layer / Analytics Layer / Universal Variable concept for passing data between the web server and web analytics tags served through a Content Distribution Network (CDN) also known as a Tag Manager. Besides the paid Tag Manager tools such as Tealium, there is the free but proprietary Adobe Tag Manager (for Adobe customers only, so far) and the free Google Tag Manager offering open to anyone. Many installations have implemented Google Tag Manager with SiteCatalyst, Webtrends and other web analytics tags.

Anyway, the gist of Akin’s article is that there is some movement in the industry towards a standardization of the Data Layer data elements. The Data Layer is a key/value JavaScript Object variable. Some tools (such as GTM) have libraries to help developers make standard calls to get data into the data layer for the Tag Manager to pick up and inject the data elements into various tags as they ‘fire’.

Here’s a page at the W3C where the industry giants are building a draft standard for the web analytics data layer.

More to come on Tag Manager tools…. it’s an interesting time!