TagMan

Boden, the international online clothes retailer, has hired independent universal tag management system TagMan for tag management and to help the company understand the full journey its customers take on their way to buying from its websites.

The company, which employs 800+ staff and operates in the US, UK, Germany and Austria, will use TagMan to manage the tracking tags from search, display and affiliate campaigns on all its websites.

By plugging the third-party tracking tags from all its marketing channels into a single TagMan container tag on its pages, Boden will be able to follow the complete path to conversion that any of its customers take, including whether they come direct to the site or click or view on natural or paid search results, affiliate links or display campaigns.

It will use this insight to plan future campaigns more effectively, since it will be able to see which channel played what role in delivering a customer.

Oliver Elliott, online acquisition manager at Boden, said: “TagMan will give Boden’s marketing teams the power and flexibility to add and edit tracking tags as well as the rules governing their deployment. This can be carried out in minutes, whenever we or our partners require, without the need for scheduled updates to the website.

“Beyond tag management, TagMan will provide us with a rich source of touch-point data to better understand attribution and interaction across all online marketing channels. After a lengthy search, we’re confident that TagMan is the technology best placed to deliver this for Boden and are delighted to be one of the innovative businesses working with them.”

Jon Baron, general manager at TagMan, said: “Boden instantly and completely understood the potential benefits of using TagMan, especially where they have many sites to manage and campaigns from which to derive insight.”

About Boden

Boden is Britain’s best loved mail order clothing brand - selling womenswear, menswear, children’s and babywear through our catalogue, website and our two shops. We make well-made, colourful, flattering and fashionable clothes and accessories with a sense of fun and style at a fair price, delivered directly to your door.

Set up by Johnnie Boden in 1991, who was inspired by the high standards set by US mail order companies, Boden filled a gap in the UK market. Boden is now a £168 million turnover (2008) business employing approximately 800 staff.

The website was launched in 1999 (www.boden.co.uk) and is continually modernised: today 67% of UK sales and 75% of USA sales are taken over the internet. On average we’ll see around 330,000 visitors to the website every week in the UK and 190,000 in the US.

About TagMan

TagMan is a tag management system that solves the problems associated with site tagging and tracking of online marketing campaigns – including deduplication and marketing attribution - by acting as a single system and interface through which tags can be deployed to an advertiser’s web site.

Clients include advertisers Virgin Atlantic, Thomas Cook, and Alliance & Leicester and agencies Media Contacts, TBG London, Blue Barracuda and Didit.

It won the 2008 Econsultancy Innovation Award in the web analytics category where the judges said: “The creation of a single system and interface through which tags can be deployed is a significant innovation that can help remove the burden caused by the proliferation of tags as well as enabling complete campaign tracking.”

Find out more at http://www.tagman.com

TagMan’s appointment by Boden was covered in this news story by New Media Age

Many companies have commented that through their use of an advanced web analytics company like AT Internet, Omniture or RedEye they already have analysis of every campaign a user clicks on in their path to conversion, and as a result they struggle to see how TagMan can help them beyond that.

This post will identify the differences and why any marketer would actually need both an analytics solution and TagMan.

TagMan is an independent container tag solution.  Typically, it sits on every page within your website and will manage the serving of all your tags including campaign tags such as affiliate or PPC or email conversion tags; web analytics tags; multivariate testing tags from technologies like Optimost and retargeting tags from services like Criteo.

Via a user interface, you, the marketer can load up any of these tags passing any page parameters (such as basket values, departure dates, product IDs etc.) into the tags without needing the resource of your time-poor IT colleagues.

As part of the way TagMan works, it can track every event a user clicks or views including SEO and report that full path to conversion.  This is where I think the misconception of an overlap comes in.

The overlap misconception

The difference is that with web analytics, you retrospectively analyse the data to improve future media planning – possibly looking to attribute the credit of sales against the many campaigns a user has responded to.

With TagMan, while you still retrospectively analyse the data, you also set up an attribution model to run in real time.  On that cherished confirmation page, all the campaign tags are served conditionally through TagMan, and so depending on the campaigns the customer has responded to and the attribution model, TagMan will only serve the campaign tags which have led to the sale.

To make this seamlessly work with your CPA partners (such as performance marketing agencies or affiliate networks), TagMan goes a step further by intelligently serving the portion of campaign tags related to the portion of credit the campaign will get for each sale.

Example

By way of illustration, imagine a user clicks on a PPC link on Monday, clicks on an affiliate link on Tuesday, and clicks on an SEO link on Friday making a purchase of £90.  If you are running a flat attribution model – where the credit of the sale is split evenly by all the campaigns which drove the sale; on the confirmation page, TagMan will serve tags for all 3 campaigns, and in the case of the affiliate tag, pass a shopping cart value of 1/3 of the sale (ie £30).

In this instance, the affiliate is then able to claim their full commission on the revenue they collect through their tags and no negotiation is required after the event.

Without the tags being conditionally served, these campaign tags will be served for every sale, and the network will then claim for every sale which was generated by a click on their marketing.

Trying to develop a multiple awarding mechanism through web analytics would take analysis of each sale to calculate the correct portion of credit for each campaign, and then to present the findings to each network and partner to work out the commission payments.  All in all a fairly time consuming and messy way to work!

Clients often ask us the best way to track how users arrive at the website, and this has developed into a discussion inside TagMan to which we’d welcome the input from any.

There are two ways to track someone arriving from a campaign:

1. Via a redirect (bouncing the user from the publishing site via a tracking server before getting through to the advertiser’s site)
2. Via a container tag on the landing page (a TagMan one natch) which either piggy-backs a campaign parameter in the URL, or if there one isn’t already there, is written into the URL which the tracking tag on the landing page can pick up

Both have their pros and cons

The redirect is the most straightforward in setting up at implementation, and will be the most accurate at counting every single click on the link (regardless of how many users actually arrive at the destination page). However, This can’t be used for every campaign, especially natural search traffic as you can’t manipulate the link from the search engine. The other issue is that it may add latency to the user experience in that the tracking link gets in the way of the destination page (even though we have super fast servers on a Content Delivery Network running at 20% capacity to cope with the expected unexpected spikes)

Tracking via the landing page provides best practice in terms of the user experience as nothing gets in the way of the user, however it’s a bit more cumbersome to set up (costing more up front). It will also track less activity due to natural latency of users, i.e. the user clicks on the link but before the landing page and tracking tag loads, they close the window or click elsewhere which means the activity won’t be recorded.

Example

To explain this latency effect with an example, imagine a scenario where I run a campaign, of which 100 people click the link, 90 people arrive fully on the landing page (10 people have clicked elsewhere before the site has managed to load) and 5 people buy the product.

By tracking via a redirect, the site conversion of users from this campaign was 5 in 100 (or 5%). However if tracked via a landing page the site conversion will be 5 in 90 (or 5.6%) – by tracking via a landing page, the ‘site conversion’ of these users will be higher meaning the ‘quality’ of these users are better than the quality of users tracked via a redirect.

Therefore, if a marketer tracks different types of campaign with different methods (e.g. PPC by landing page, display by redirect), they won’t be comparing apples with apples if looking at the ‘quality’ of the traffic these campaigns are providing and may penalise the display ads mistakenly.

Does anyone care?

Will the marketer care about this minor discrepancy? What are the triggers marketers use to cut and increase media buying across different channels?

While this theoretical issue seems like an issue to address, our clients haven’t worried too much about this approach in the past, which leads me to consider that I’ve too much time on my hands to worry about issues that won’t make a difference to the bottom line.

Still, currently, we typically setup redirects for display, affiliates & email and arrange landing page tracking for SEO & PPC, however if enough noise is drummed up by the advertisers, perhaps we should suggest all campaigns are tracked by landing pages (at a slightly increased cost of set up to the marketer.)

Discuss!

I’d like to thank Dixons for their latest tube ads which should bring to light how important the consideration and selection of products are as well as the final purchase in the sales process.

Now while they happily suggest consumers go elsewhere to pick which TV they want and visit their website to make the sale, many brands should be asking for consumers to consider and select products from within their own site as they will have a much higher chance of eventually selling that product to the prospect when the time comes.

With this in mind, using the traditional mechanism of a ‘last click’ wins model, only the marketing efforts which drive the visit of the eventual sale will get the credit, whereas Dixons rightly highlights the prospect’s need to spend time considering what to buy before the final plunge.

By using a last click win model, all the visits to your website which are for selecting and considering products will get no credit for the sale, even though they have an immense effect on the eventual conversion on that customer.

By running an attribution model which shares the credit of a campaign against all marketing events the prospect has responded to, your media planning will be more wisely spent, and the eventual returns much higher.  Ie, users who have visited the site already and looked for products are far more likely to buy that product from you on an eventual ‘purchase’ visit.

A few case studies to prove this are on the way from a number of major high street retailer and travel companies.  Get in touch and I’ll make sure you see them first!

Virgin Atlantic is working with tag management system TagMan to help it manage and track the online campaigns it has running across all its websites, which cover 25 markets around the world.

The company has appointed TagMan as its global ‘container tag’, a single page tag that houses all the tags used to track Virgin Atlantic’s online campaigns, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and email.

Veronica Brown, e-commerce commercial manager at Virgin Atlantic, said: “We are pleased to be working with Tagman as this system will enable Virgin Atlantic to add, edit and remove tracking tags more efficiently and, in so doing, save huge amounts of time and energy in the implementation and management of campaigns.”

The system will also allow Virgin Atlantic and its partners to see the entire path to conversion that any user takes to buying from one of its sites. Brown said this will enable them to be smarter about how they apportion future spend and ‘deduplicate’ between channels that claim commission from the same sale. The company will gain instant savings in this way.

Brown commented: “Being able to quickly amend our tracking tags is key for us, as globally we continue to deliver a high number of marketing campaigns. We are very excited about the flexibility and control that TagMan will give us to ensure we are able to track and attribute accordingly.”

Virgin Atlantic is the latest e-commerce giant to sign up to TagMan to get on top of the huge number of tracking tags now sitting on e-commerce sites. Thomas Cook, Alliance & Leicester and many others also use the system to manage the way they implement and track online campaigns.

Jon Baron, general manager of TagMan, said: “Just on a practical level Virgin Atlantic will save time and money in the way it implements and tracks its campaigns. But, the company is also keen on the strategic edge it will gain by having a central, ‘ultimate tag’ that is independent of tag providers and which puts control of the data that tags provide back in its hands.”

About Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic celebrated its 25^th birthday this year and since it was founded the airline has become Britain’s second largest carrier serving the world’s major cities. Now based at both London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports, it operates long haul services to thirty destinations world-wide as far apart as Las Vegas and Shanghai.

Virgin Atlantic has enjoyed huge popularity, winning top business, consumer and trade awards from around the world. The airline has pioneered a range of innovations setting new standards of service, which its competitors have subsequently sought to follow. Despite Virgin Atlantic’s growth the service still remains customer driven with an emphasis on value for money, quality, fun and innovation.

About TagMan

TagMan is an independent tag management solution that enables agencies and advertisers to manage online marketing tags – and the data they provide – much more effectively.

By acting as a single system through which tags can be deployed to an advertiser’s web site, online marketers can regain control of their marketing data, track users throughout their path to conversion and make immediate savings in the way they add, edit and remove online tracking tags on their websites.

Clients include online advertisers and agencies in the UK, US and Germany, including Thomas Cook, Alliance & Leicester, Christy Towels, Media Contacts, TBG London, Blue Barracuda and Didit.

Find out more at http://www.tagman.com

Paul Cook, TagMan CEO, has written a detailed blog post on marketing attribution on Econsultancy, explaining exactly how advertisers can attribute proportionate amounts of both credit and commissions to different marketing ‘events’ based on the role they played in delivering a website customer.

In the post he says: “First, it is important to make the distinction between attributing credit to channels in your reports for better planning and dynamically awarding proportions of commission to partners using an attribution model.

“Obviously, Google isn’t about to accept a lower percentage of the CPC because you tell it the click it delivered only played a small part in a sale. But you can attribute different levels of ‘credit’ to it in order to provide you with data that may help determine your future spending plans.

“However, for CPA channels, where the advertiser controls the commission that gets paid, clients really can begin to award percentages of commission to multiple channels, based on insight into the role they played.”

He then explains precisely how attribution works and what it means. Whether using attribution models to attribute ‘credit’ to channels more fairly or to actually reward commission-based channels, it’s the start of a new phase, where the industry can finally move away from ‘last-click wins’.

We know that consumers will engage with a brand several times before purchasing and we’re moving to a point where this journey can be accurately mapped and assumptions made.

While retail clients consistently favour paying on a last-click wins basis – ‘the last argument before purchase must be the most convincing’ - there are many examples of how marketers are more sensitive to their users’ psychology.

Examples of ‘engagement’

Here’s a few examples of where engagement mapping across the standard digital touch points - display (banners on publisher sites, ad networks), affiliates, email marketing, paid & natural search -has been relevant:

1. I went to a presentation a few years ago by a rich media vendor where a study showed the optimum number of times a banner should be seen (to maximise click-to-conversion rate) is three.

2. Another study showed that video ads should be between 10-20 seconds in length to optimise click-through rate.

3. A marketing manager at a mobile phone reseller spent greater budget on display than the click-conversions warranted – he could see data that showed users were more likely to convert if they’d seen banner ads, even though the last touch point before conversion was consistently clicks via PPC or SEO.

4. A gambling client of mine would pay the CPA bounty on a first-click wins basis; they were certain that getting a user to visit their site in the first instance was the hardest part of the sales process given the saturated market (their target market was users who were already a member of 3-5 gambling sites).

So some verticals rely on exploiting their users’ impulse to purchase with timed-limited offers specific to them while others feel they’re racing to reach their target market, and use engaging (sometimes uncomfortably distracting) copy to stand out; interrupting a user’s typical ‘ad blind’ journey. Others contrive for the user to encounter and compare their product in search cycles and user reviews; convinced theirs will win through on merit.

My point is that marketers are responding to their users’ psychology with competitors, buying cycles and the holistic digital journey in mind. It’s apparent that the brain reacts to repetition, unusual stimuli, and that our thought processes before ad engagement can positively or negatively affect that engagement (what was the user doing before we dragged them to our site?).

We are thinking in engagement maps, touch points and ad sequencing; and it’s clear this is having an impact on purchase probability. We’re moving away from dividing budget by sales channel and to spending on the combination and timing of digital media.

So why one commission?

But, why do we still tend to pay 100% of CPA bounty to the significant channel (whether first or last click, for example), instead of paying a significant percentage of CPA bounty to the significant channel? I don’t believe first or last click is how we should attribute credit, pay our acquisition bounties or plan our budgets. Many sales channels are adept at prolific cookie dropping, so that they exist in the majority of conversion paths. Others will even persuade users to delete their cookies so that a specific newly dropped cookie overrides them.

So what I’d recommend is a ‘best click’ model. This is how that might be achieved:

1. Use a first or last-click model as a foundation and rank your engagement points: highest for those you feel are doing the most selling (e.g. affiliates on a one-day click window, perhaps banners on a one-hour click window); lowest for those you feel are the most transactional (i.e. those that are the obvious route to buying a product - and retailer - a customer has already decided on) or are serial cookie droppers (e.g. PPC on brand terms, maybe one-day view windows on reach ad networks).

2. Arrange for the correct conversion tag to be written into the conversion page based on rank and timing, using them to award higher proportions of commission (and overall credit) to those high-rank channels where they appear in the conversion path.

Dynamic awarding & attribution: proportionate commissions

Dynamic awarding & attribution: PPC given higher priority

Our charts show how - by giving one channel a higher priority (because you rank it as being a better driver of ‘unique’ sales) - you can also give it a higher proportion of credit and commission. In the second chart, PPC is ranked as highest priority so - even when it appears as the second to last click - it gets the most credit.

This is a complex process but one that requires a useful exercise – to really think through which channels you believe in as drivers of sales you wouldn’t otherwise have, rather than those that deliver customers who were already committed to you and your product. Once in place, the way you rank channels and executions (like keywords) and attribute commission can be constantly refined.

Of course, even this model is flawed; any model that tries to pinpoint the significant engagement event among many is inconsistent with our users’ psychologies and prone to abuse. Still, attributing credit across multiple touch points, from both a reporting and awarding point of view helps to alleviate the distortion created by the sales channels currently fighting for that first or last click.

Progressive attribution

CPA sales channels should be incentivised for finding the right users and speaking to their psychology, and discouraged from just putting themselves at the right point of the conversion path to claim the final click. We can now pass a weighted proportion of the CPA bounty to an affiliate, or that can load a conversion tag for a weighted proportion of the time; all according to the attribution model selected. You may know this method as dynamic awarding or applied attribution.

Despite the flaws in drawing accurate conclusions from user journeys, I feel the marketing community intuitively builds a critical mass of engagement. I’ve lost count of the marketers I know that can’t prove why display contributes to post-view conversions, but are convinced it does (there’s a fair few that can prove it too!). Ad saturation here or under-exposure there can reverse the build-up of pressure - the critical sales point must be capitalised on before the pressure fades or is directed away by a competitor. Modelling this critical mass of engagement with correct statistical treatment (which is what the digital marketplace is acclaimed for), will obviously yield dividends.

All the research we’ve been engaged in the past twelve months has sought to make a simple point – that tags really do matter.

While TagMan does one simple thing – house all your page tracking tags in one tag – it’s the problems that one thing solves that demonstrate just how integral to online marketing success (& failure) tags have become.

So, our latest Latency Test study - http://www.tagman.com/case-study/tracking-tag-management-latency-study.pdf - shows that tags affect your ability to do basic things like get your pages to load quickly and track the number of visits your site gets effectively.

Meanwhile, the deduplication research we published earlier this year (http://www.tagman.com/pf_cpa_duplication_amnesty) shows that the proliferation of different tags (ad servers, PPC, site analytics, affiliate networks) on client’s pages has made it impossible for agencies to tell which of them delivered the final click, and thus to which (if they pay on last click) they should pay commission. The problem we reckoned costs advertisers about £35m a year just on affiliate CPA duplication.

These things have proven reasonably easy to measure. But, the most basic ‘cost’ of tagging’ – the total pain of adding, editing and removing tags on a web page – is more tricky. There can be no doubt that agencies in particular face genuine costs as a result of this ongoing nightmare. First, in terms of the man hours it takes to create and implement new tags. Second, in terms of the delays to campaigns that occur in this process (when some site development cycles mean you have to wait three months to make a change, for example). And third, who’s counting the cost of the errors that are made in tracking campaigns because a tag has been added incorrectly? We’re hoping to announce soon a partnership with a major digital media agency to estimate all these things.

Last, there is the real strategic importance of tags. Marketing is truly becoming a data-driven business. To have any chance of holding sway in that future, organisations must become the owners and controllers of their own data. Given that this is delivered through tracking tags, that means regaining control of them.

Tags - tiny things that they are - really do matter.

Our new study into the effect of third-party tracking tags on site download times and data reporting was a bit of an eye-opener. In short, the main findings - which are covered in a Q&A with TagMan founder Paul Cook on Econsultancy here - were:

1) Tags really do slow down your page

The slowest-loading assets on site pages in our study were tracking tags, taking as much as 250ms. Based on our study, a delay of around one second causes approximately 10% of users to abandon the page, suggesting that four tags on the page could lose you 10% of your visitors.

2) Tag position needs careful consideration

If page load speeds are slow then very different figures will be reported depending on where tags are placed and the relative effect of the tag will be far less. In our test, hecklerspray.com achieved a 20% increase in the traffic reported by Google Anayltics when the tag was placed at the top of the page, which would be a good argument to put the code higher up the page.

3) Page optimisation is critical

The rate at which users abandon slow pages underlines the need to ensure they are written with a view to loading as quickly as possible. Both sites in the test contained third-party analytics tags that were no longer in use. An easy place to start would be to identify any tags that are no longer in use and remove them.

4) IFrame container tags suffer the most

The worst performing method of including tags in the page was via an invisible iFrame at the bottom of the page – the method used by the major container-tag solutions. The tests showed the most effective way to collect data is by using a blank JavaScript call, particularly if the tracking code is placed at the end of the page.

There’s a summary of the findings here and, to get a copy of the full report, complete with all the results and the code Paul used to run the test, email us at contact@tagman.com

Great to see that Shop.org, a collective for online retailers, is putting real effort into getting heads around the problem of marketing attribution.

It’s launched a campaign to build a team of people to investigate marketing attribution so that all channels in the online conversion process (including natural search!) get fair credit for the work they do in delivering a customer, even if they’re not ‘the last click’.

Shop.org is inviting people to volunteer their help and says it will, and I quote:

”

• Review current multi-channel allocation methodologies for determining incremental sales, highlighting the pros and cons of various approaches
• Review available and emerging technologies for tracking and allocation
• Recommend best practices for retailers to implement in their organizations to effectively measure the incremental impact of their marketing dollars”