TagMan

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”

TagMan CEO Paul Cook has contributed a key blog post to Econsultancy.com revealing how the way Google Analytics tracks natural search makes effective marketing attribution a rather challenging business for site owners.

Full post here: http://econsultancy.com/blog/3963-does-google-analytics-overstate-the-value-of-search

We are finding TagMan has been gaining a number of different nick names recently so I thought it was worth clarifying that as well as being a universal container tag, we could also be described as a tag bucket or pixel server. Pixel serving seems to be particularly topical at the moment as agencies and networks look for ways to identify users across multiple ad exchanges. In pixel serving mode TagMan allows users to be identified across multiple exchanges, helping agencies understand how to reach particular users more cheaply. Clients can create user cookie dictionaries to identify users accross multiple points by populating third party tags with the TagMan Global User Id. Whilst they cannot tell who these users are, our smart tags do allow companies to identify that a user is the same, which enables them to optimise their marketing attribution as a result.

Just a heads up and a few words on our new ‘brand’. We’ve not changed much, just the tagline but that was difficult enough.

The challenge was to come up with something that summed up what TagMan is and does. The problem was that ‘what it is’ is known as many things: a universal tag, container tag, Floodlight tag, universal action tag, tag management system etc. etc.

Second, it does lots of things: campaign tracking, path to conversion analysis, attribution modelling, deduplication, tag management etc. etc.

Then there’s ‘actually’ what it allows you to do: be independent from technology providers, regain control of your data, save time and energy in the tagging process, save money on duplicate commission/CPA payments, plan your online advertising spend much more effectively (by seeing the whole user journey), and join up your site analytics and online advertising data.

So, given all these things, how could we come up with something that explained all that AND was punchy and memorable?

Well, by discussing it for ages. In the end, we plumped for a dual-action tagline, the first bit to explain what TagMan is and the second to explain what it does for you. So ‘Smart tags, smarter marketing’ was our answer. We wonder what yours might have been?

Just to let you know, Paul Cook has posted a piece on marketing attribution and tracking the path to conversion on his econsultancy blog – http://econsultancy.com/blog/3731-better-technology-better-marketing-attribution-4)

I’ve recently finished an excellent book written by one of our US customers, Didit (www.didit.com). Kevin Lee’s (www.kevinlee.net) book, the eye’s have it, is a brilliant history of online marketing and in particular the emergence of search and Google. Kevin is a firm advocate of collecting as much data as possible and this is something we’re pleased to be helping them do for their clients. The book highlights the challenges traditional agencies face adapting to the modern media marketplace and touches on some of the exciting opportunities that exist around display advertising exchanges.  You can find a link to buy the book on Amazon from Kevin’s Site (www.kevinlee.net), definitely one for any serious online marketer’s bookshelf!

We’re pleased to annouce the beta version of above-the-fold detection support for TagMan view tags. TagMan view tags can be use to track ad views regardless of which ad server is being used. These tags provide a highly cost-effective (cheap!) way of tracking impressions in the path to conversion. The new release allows you to only count “views” on banners where the banner has appeared on the screen, traditional ad tracking counts views even if the ad is served off the bottom or side of the page and it is never scrolled on to. As well as on-screen tracking we also offer more qualified view-based conversions by allowing a window within which a user must engaged (visit the site) for a conversion to be counted. For example you may want to allow 24 hours for someone to start a quote and then 30 days for them to complete the transaction. We’re now beta testing the on-screen tracking with clients and look forward to reporting back the results in due course

We’re pleased to announce that we are working with Europe’s largest travel retailer - Thomas Cook. They are using us to de-duplicate between affiliate networks and paid search and to reward affiliates on a first click wins basis. Following a successful roll-out to www.ThomasCook.com they have now deployed TagMan container tags onto www.mytravel.com as well. More details on this story are available at http://www.netimperative.com/news/2009/february/thomas-cook-hires-tagman-for-ad-tracking

Just to let you know we’ve updated the buzz section of our website with articles about TagMan and CPA de-duplication, to see this information please click through to the TagMan website here to check out the latest news and recommended reading

Just thought I’d post what the e-consultancy Innovation Awards committee judges commented about the TagMan winning container tag solution: “The creation of a single system and interface through which tags can be deployed is a significant innovation which can help to remove the burden caused by the proliferation of tags as well as enabling complete campaign tracking.”