Good Health Media, Inc. Appoints TagMan

To Accelerate Client Online Advertising Campaigns

NEW YORK (August 30, 2010) Good Health Media, one of the fastest growing health ad networks, today announced that it has picked TagMan as its global “container tag,” enabling the company to accelerate its client online marketing campaigns while reducing costs by implementing third-party tags/pixels without IT resources.

TagMan’s single page tag will house all of the tags/pixels used to track Good Health Media (GHM) online ad campaigns, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and email. Using the TagMan interface, GHM will have a single view of the effectiveness and interaction of its online advertising campaigns and will be able to see the interaction between the consumer and all online marketing channels, enabling it to enhance its optimization of online campaigns and media budget allocation.

“We chose to work with TagMan because it has an established track record in tag management and will help us drive better results for our advertisers and publishing partners. We can now instantly add or amend our tracking tags, which means we no longer have to send requests to different IT teams to change tags. This will save money as well as time,” says Bill Jennings, CEO of Good Health Media.

“Good Health Media can not only switch existing tags in and out in a matter of minutes, adding new tags instantly, it can now see the entire path a customer takes to conversion. This will enable them to make informed marketing optimisation decisions,” says Paul Cook, CEO, of TagMan. “We are pleased to have then as a partner.”

Good Health Media (www.ghmedia.com) delivers specific health condition audiences to pharma and consumer brands. The company’s “ConditionMatch” technology tracks and targets the most frequent visitors to niche health content, often at half the CPM of the major health portals. Advertisers include: Merck, J&J, Wyeth, Shire, Takeda, Walmart Pharmacy, and Amgen. Good Health Media was recently ranked as the fastest growing health ad network with 93% user growth in the past 12 months (Comscore).

GHM is backed by Metamorphic Ventures and several individual investors including Mike Perlis (Softbank), Rick Thompson/Larry Braitman (Founders Adify, Flycast), Joe Apprendi (Founder Collective), Richard Forman (Health Venture Group), Geoff Judge (co-founder 24/7), Bill Benedict (Alpine Meridian), Chris Young (Founder Digital Broadcasting Group). ConditionMatch and ConditionSearch are trademarks of Good Health Media.

TagMan (www.TagMan.com) is the single-tag solution to the problems of online campaign tracking and slow pages loads due to excess tags. By acting as a single, universal tag and interface through which tracking tags and pixels can be deployed to a retailer, e commerce or advertiser’s web site, online marketers can save time and money in the way they track campaigns and they can see how all online channels are working together. Clients include Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Air New Zealand. TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has offices in New York and London.

Attribution.    Real-time,  Applied Marketing Attribution.

Short version of this post: You are not handling Attribution in real-time.  You may ‘think’ you are – but you are not.   Attribution models, tell you what to do – but you still need to do it. TagMan can help you.

Long version of this post

Stuck in the lounge at the airport with 2 hour delay is a perfect chance to ask write and ask YOU, the reader,  to question the difference between ‘Attribution Modeling and Attribution Reporting’  (ie Passive vs Real-time).   Please, do comment below with your thoughts.

First, some words.  What is Multi Touch Attribution, Multi Channel Attribution, Marketing Attribution, Media Attribution (take a breath) Credit Attribution, Affiliate Attribution, Search Attribution…   There is just so much buzz, so many articles, so many conferences, reports etc but lets be clear  - there are only three groups of people reading this.

• a) You are a company talking about doing it (eg – what should be done, what should you do and which channel, advert, partner specific campaign attribution should go to)
• b) You are a company doing it right now. ( ‘Real Time Attribution or ‘Applied Attribution’ – making it happen, right now.)
• c) You are a competitor(ish) reading our blog posts

Which are you?   Talking (Passive) or doing (Applying)?

Hate to tell you (& you can tell the boss) – you are all most likely still in Group A   even though you thought otherwise.    You are talking, not doing.

Humor me…

Even if you have a great SaaS ‘Attribution Management’ vendor with charts that tell you great things.  Even if you have advanced advertising analytics tag(s) that you have installed (at great labor) extensively on all of your pages – you are still looking at ‘what you should have done’ and ‘what should be done’.    It’s all still passive –  It’s not Real-Time reporting.

Those 200 different charts and models in that ‘platform’ who’s tags you have coded on all your pages (how long will you keep those attribution tags there btw?)  – they are not helping you in Real-Time.   That attribution provider that shows you all types of models and reports from the past year about various shares of  profit, revenue, conversions etc…    it’s still not happened.   It is still just ‘passive models’.  Sure – you know something about what is going on, but you are still looking at ‘what you should have done’.  You need to ‘apply’ it now.   Not wait 3 months.

If, like me, you work better on analogies.   Let us look at it this way:

Picture yourself on a plane (unlike me, I’m stuck in the lounge still). You are currently passive.

You open up the inflight magazine and look at the map in the back of where that plane can fly in America and in the world.   You know, that pretty, impressive map that shows every possible route across America. It’s just screaming out colors and ‘impressive routes’.    (cant wait to see that on an ipad)

It would have taken many aviation experts  months to chart those courses (and in many pretty colors, lines and graphics) and many graphic designers worked on making it look nice – but you and all your fellow passengers like me are still not actually at the destination yet.    You are still passive on the Tarmac (most likely O’hare) waiting to take off from point a (where you are sitting passive) to get to b (your destination (applied)).     No matter how many times you look at that map or how many models of that journey (200 different routes in 200 different colors) you look at – you still need to ‘Apply in Real-Time’ a journey.  The journey has not yet happened. You (or the pilot) still need to chose a route, with all the differing variables and make it happen.      You need to ‘Dynamically Apply’ in ‘Real-Time’ the idea of getting from ‘a’ (where you are) to ‘b’ (where you want to be).

Group a (talking about doing it) (looking at and drawing lots of routes in pretty colors but still on tarmac)

Group b (Doing it right now) (making that journey right now, in Real-Time) (EG, Dynamically Loading Tags and Reporting)

Having one, agnostic tag management solution – that connects all data, connects all partners and ‘serves all tags’ changes your multi-touch attribution results dramatically.    The process of “Applied Attribution in Real-Time” assists your business get a competitive edge.    Where many vendors simply provide a company with ‘visual attribution modeling’, because TagMan controls ‘what tags get served, when, why and to who’, it allows advertisers to ‘APPLY Attribution in Real-Time. This means you are saving marketing spend now – not 3 months later.    (You get  to where you want to be now and not sit on the Tarmac for 3 months).        If you were to put that into a monetary perspective and you could make real-time savings and get access to an extra 15% of your budget now to spend elsewhere… not in 3 months time – you can see the competitive advantage.   Our clients can (and do).

Ask your current multi-touch attribution or attribution model provider or even your current lite-tag container provider if they can do this.   They may tell you that you can take your key models and ask your media teams to ‘apply them’, but that defeats the purpose – how long will it take to apply that model?

By managing ‘all tracking tags and vendors’ through one vendor agnostic platform, TagMan offer the built in ‘off the shelf’ ability to enable real time, dynamic attribution awarding and reporting across all marketing service providers including Natural Search and Direct to Site. We allow you to create custom real-time models to instantly remove payments claimed by partners, when you know the catalogue number should get that credit, not an affiliate.    You want to de duplicate that affiliate TODAY, now, in real-time, using complex rules based on cookie window, model etc.    We help to ensure that only the conversion pixel for the MOST RELEVANT partner gets loaded up.  We ensure that you only report on what matters and only pay on what matters .  Your internal reports match your vendor reports and gives you an instant ROI ‘now’, so you have that money to spend elsewhere ‘now’ to grow your business and sales – not in 3 months time when you may get round to it when you’ve finished drawing different pretty routes.

We would love you to ‘apply’ in ‘real-time’ for a demo of TagMan. Drop us an email to find out more.  We are all happy to show you a quick demo and show you case-studies of where clients are saving money and truly on top of Applied Multi-Touch Attribution.

NEW YORK (July 21, 2010) TagMan, the marketing tag management system that solves the problems associated with site tagging and tracking of online marketing campaigns through a single universal tag, today announced a Board of Advisors tasked to consult with the rapidly growing company on its strategy and tactics.

“TagMan has achieved significant traction amongst web marketers by taking away the pain associated with deploying tracking pixels, speeding up their pages and providing multichannel attribution reports in real-time,” says company CEO and founder Paul Cook. “We are very pleased to have an exceptional team of deeply experienced advisors to help up take TagMan’s sophisticated proposition to mainstream marketers.”

The Board includes:

Brendan Condon: With 25 years of global media experience across several TIME WARNER divisions (serving the past seven years at AOL overseeing its global Mobile, SEM, Affiliate and APAC advertising businesses and before that, 18 years at TIME Inc), Mr. Condon specializes in media monetization, especially digital with and local cross-media advertising.

Formerly, the Managing Director of AOL’s Platform-A International advertising division, based in London, Mr. Condon led the business with full P+L responsibilities, and a team of more than 500 employees across 10 European countries and Japan.

Calvin Lui: The former President & CEO of Tumri, the leading provider of dynamic creative solutions for online display advertising, Calvin Lui has a strong history of building teams and scaling businesses, both online and offline, with particular emphasis on sales, marketing, business development and corporate development. Prior to Tumri, Mr. Lui served as COO of Connexus a leading Internet performance marketing company, and also served as President of its Traffic Marketplace division.  He has also worked as SVP of Sales and Marketing at Ticketmaster, served as CEO at TheMan.com and held management positions at Lycos, St. Paul Venture Capital and Credit Suisse First Boston.

John Marshall: has 30 years experience of entrepreneurship in the software and Internet industries. He is a Netscape alumnus and went on to found ClickTracks , a pioneering web analytics tool.  Mr. Marshall invented and patented several important innovations within analytics, including the now ubiquitous overlay view. ClickTracks was acquired by Lyris Technologies in 2006.  Mr. Marshall is a founder of Market Motive, providing training courses and certification in online marketing.

Tom Sipple: is currently a Vice President at Interactive Corporation (IAC), leading the monetization strategy, direct sales, aggregator partners, mobile and advertising operations groups for Dictionary.com (part of the family of brands). He joined IAC from Yahoo! where he spent eight years in various roles, but most recently as Managing Director of Yahoo, SE Asia managing Yahoo’s user and revenue growth in the emerging markets of Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.  Prior to moving to Asia, Mr. Sipple was a Strategic Account Director in display media sales for Yahoo based in San Francisco. He also worked at USA Today leading circulation and advertising for the travel category.

TagMan (www.TagMan.com) is the single-tag solution to the problems of online campaign tracking and slow pages loads due to excess tags. By acting as a single, universal tag and interface through which tracking tags and pixels can be deployed to a retailer, e commerce or advertiser’s web site, online marketers can save time and money in the way they track campaigns and see how all online channels are working together. Clients include Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Air New Zealand. TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has offices in New York and London.

Chatting with a TagMan client (who I can’t name) about the attribution data we provide them, I was really impressed with the approach they have taken in assessing the quality (and ROI) of campaigns and how they use this data in their media planning.

The digital currency of awarding credit is still on the last click that generated the sale, and this is what they use for awarding their affiliates and other CPA channels commission for the business they generate. However, they use the attribution analysis of the campaigns to work out if a CPA channel is producing a positive ROI – and therefore if they should continue to invest in it.

Non-brand SEO vs. Affiliates

I’d like to illustrate this by looking at two of the campaigns we are tracking for them: non branded SEO and the affiliate sales through a well known and respected network.

On a last-click win analysis (how commission is awarded), non-brand terms in natural search results generated 600 conversions with revenue of £18,000 and the affiliate generated 4,300 conversions with revenue of £170,000.

On the face of it, it doesn’t look like SEO non brand really does much for them, and that the affiliate is doing a far better job.

The catch comes when marketers have a hunch that due to cash-back and voucher-code sites, the affiliate is cannibalising the sales of the other campaigns – shall we call it goal-hanging – and make a decision to stop working with the affiliate on this hunch.

Applied attribution

However, if you look at the sales and revenue each campaign generated not by last click, but by an attribution model it tells a very different story and with the data you can make a much better decision.

Using a flat attribution model where the credit and revenue of each sale is split evenly between all the campaigns that show up in the path to conversion, we see that, over the same date range, the non-brand SEO attributed sales (that is the sales where non-brand natural results show in the conversion path) were 4,050 with revenue of £145,000 and the affiliate generated 1,900 attributed sales with £73,000 revenue.

This shows the marketers hunch was partly right, but the key number is the attributed revenue by both campaigns.  For ease of numbers, let’s say this client had a profit margin of 10%.  Therefore the profit on the SEO work was £14,500 while the profit of the affiliate was £7,300.

Change in budget spend

As it happened, this client didn’t spent nearly £14,500 on SEO marketing and as a result of this data now spend incredibly more and are looking forward to seeing this channel push up last click conversions to other channels.

Moreover, while the affiliate wasn’t generating as much value as reported by last click, the profit was still higher than the commission paid out – i.e. the affiliate is still a channel with positive ROI even with the cash-back and voucher-code sites, and so the client also continues to invest heavily in this area.

I purposefully haven’t provided the length of time this analysis was over as the idea can work for smaller companies just as much for larger companies.  Whether this data spans a single day or three months, it still ensures that as a marketer, you are basing decisions on data and not hunches.

Gatwick Airport is working with tag management system TagMan to manage and track its online campaigns for the main website gatwickairport.com.

LONDON: TagMan has been appointed as Gatwick Airport’s global ‘container tag’, a single page tag that holds all the tags used to track online campaigns, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and email.

Nick Tsimbidaros, Gatwick Airport’s e-commerce manager, said:

”A great deal of time is spent implementing and managing campaigns, which is extremely onerous as well as costly. TagMan will enable us to add, edit and remove tracking tags more efficiently, which will save us time and keep costs to a minimum.”

The system will also allow Gatwick Airport to see the entire path to conversion that any user takes to booking any of the many offers available from its site. This will enable the marketing department to pinpoint exactly how it apportions future spend and ‘deduplicate’ between channels that claim commission from the same sale. This will enable the company to reduce its affiliate campaign costs.

Jon Baron, general manager of TagMan, said: “Gatwick Airport is the latest travel and tourism brand to implement TagMan. Virgin Atlantic and Thomas Cook have been using the system for the last year and the results have been outstanding, with Thomas Cook reporting cuts of 25% on commission fees alone. Gatwick Airport provides a huge range of offers online, from flights to car parking. Its campaigns are expanding and TagMan will help them track and manage them easily and effectively.”

About TagMan

TagMan is the single-tag solution to the problems of online campaign tracking. By acting as a single, universal tag and interface through which tracking tags and pixels can be deployed to an advertiser’s web site, online marketers can save time and money in the way they track campaigns and see how all online channels are working together.

A single TagMan container tag replaces all the tracking pixels on an advertiser web page used to track, for example, natural search, paid search, affiliates, display, email or site analytics. These tags are housed inside the TagMan container and can be managed directly through a browser-based interface.

This allows them to be added, edited or removed direct from the web page in question in seconds, without troubling IT resource, which also means complete freedom to switch between tag providers such as ad servers, CPA networks and analytics companies.

Then, since the tags from all channels sit in the same system, advertisers and their agencies can track the full customer journey and tell which channel delivered a particular user much more effectively. This allows complete deduplication between CPA commission payments and marketing attribution of credit/commission across all online channels.

TagMan won the Econsultancy Innovation Award for web analytics 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.”

Clients include online advertisers and agencies in the UK, US and Germany, including Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Alliance & Leicester.

www.tagman.com

The number of different terms and jargon which are mentioned in meetings about tagging have got me round to writing an explanation of what they all mean.  I hope marketers can use this as a tool to better equip themselves for these conversations in the future (and not have IT colleagues pull the wool over their eyes!) It might take a few goes of reading, and if it’s really stymied you, give me a call and I’ll help explain it all.

The proliferation of tags

Pretty much every digital initiative a marketer undertakes involves some form of tracking to facilitate or optimise.  All ‘drive-to-web’ marketing clearly has the requirement of having campaign conversion tags or pixels sitting on the confirmation pages to track the success of the campaign, while multivariate testing and retargeting initiatives need to anonymously identify the user so they know what copy/content or creative to show.

With lots of different suppliers across different countries all requiring some form of tag on the client’s site, it isn’t surprising that so much vocabulary has been created.  I’ll try to break this down into two sections: the tag itself and the different forms it can take (including what it actually does) and then whereabouts on the page it goes.

The ‘tag’

A tag is simply a piece of code which will sit on your website. When the page is viewed by the user, the code springs to live and calls something to be retrieved from a server then the ‘tag’ will have done it’s magic.  They are often called pixels (although this is a type of tag); cookies (although this is what the tag will set on the users browser); beacons (although this is not really a tag which will sit on the page itself); universal tag (again a specific type of tag); or a container tag (like the Atlas Universal Action Tag or DoubleClick Floodlight tag).

What tags do

So, then what does this piece of code actually call?  Typically, it will do one of two things: call a 1×1 image pixel (a transparent GIF) or a JavaScript library to do something more interesting.  A 1×1 image pixel offers the most basic of telling a technology what is going on. When the page is viewed by the user, the call of the pixel can collect some parameters from the page (such as a page ID, basket value or order ID), and, when requesting the GIF from the tracking server, set a cookie on the user’s browser with an encrypted and unique identifier, and pass back to the tracking server the unique identifier (so it knows who this refers to) and any parameters or page IDs (so it knows what has gone on).

Meanwhile, cookies are simply short text files (viewed in Notepad) of encrypted information which can be read only by the technology that put them there. They don’t have any software or intelligence and cannot do anything except be recognised and be written to.  Some companies – perhaps more underhand – don’t use cookies for the fear of users deleting them, and instead they use a flash object. It works exactly the same way as a cookie, but is stored in a different place and is much, much harder to delete.

The other call a tag will make is to call a JavaScript library.  Now JavaScript is a wonderful thing in that you can write the code to do anything and therefore do anything on a page – this is perhaps one of the reasons why our esteemed IT colleagues don’t really like the idea of marketing people having this much power. However, I think that argument rather shoots itself in the foot in that an established supplier wouldn’t risk sullying their reputation by doing something which isn’t in the best interests of their client’s website.

TagMan will use a JavaScript call in a tag where we can because we (or the marketers using TagMan via the user interface) can update what the tag does without having to change the code on the website – and we all know changing code natively on a webpage can lead to huge delays.

The second issue of why IT may not be as keen on JavaScript is because a user might have disabled JavaScript to run.  Now I’m sure there is research out there with recorded stats on this, but as a straw poll, next time you are out and about with friends (not people in the industry) ask them if they know about how to turn off JavaScript.

Right, to recap. We’ve covered what the tag will call on the page, and what they’ll do on the browser. Next is where they go on the page.

Where they go

The issue of location comes down to the need for the tag to serve as early as possible in the page loading, while not getting in the way of the user experience.  Most of the time, the tag will go at the bottom of the page above the footer and still in the body of the page, although some technologies require the tag to be further up the page near the header.  If you’re confident the technology supplier of this tag will have excellent performance on their tracking servers serving the tag, you need not worry – i.e. do they serve the tags from servers in your country? Do they use a single server, or a cloud computing network? Are they sitting within a CND? If the performance is likely to be better than your own web servers, then it matters less where the tag is.  If you fear the performance might be limited, either find another supplier, or place the tag at the bottom of the page so it will be loaded once the page itself has loaded and not hinder page load times.

Tags can also be loaded within their own iFrame, essentially a parallel section which can be served simultaneously with the content of the page.  iFrames are the default technology for most container tags, including DoubleClick Floodlight and Atlas UAT, as they enable more flexibility of what the third-party tags served within the container tag can actually do (location on the page, parameters passed etc). However, they can be heavy to load. (Find out more about the impact of tags, including iFrame containers, on data accuracy and page load times in our Tag Latency Study ).

While I could go on and on about the intricacies of tags and what they do (and my family could vouch for that!), I’ll leave it there for now.  In the next blog/report, I’ll really confuse you and introduce the idea of server tags which need not go on the page at all…

Single Tag Online System to Track Online Sales

and Manage Ad Tags On Lauraashley.com

NEW YORK (March 3, 2010)  TagMan, the one-tag/pixel solution to the problems of online campaign tracking, today announced that fashion and home furnishings retailer Laura Ashley has implemented TagMan on Lauraashley.com. The TagMan system, which enables all ad tracking tags on a site to be housed and managed through a single tag, will be used to reveal the click-path any customer makes in buying from the site. This will make campaigns easier to implement and for commission payments to be attributed with greater accuracy.

“Without TagMan, marketers can’t plan their campaigns based on a true understanding of customer behavior, the channels that work, and how they perform together. Industry experts estimate that, there is 20%-30% waste in current budgets,” says Jon Baron, general manager of TagMan. “TagMan levels the playing field enabling marketers to choose the technologies that best suit their business, rather than being tied into the large incumbent players that dominate online advertising following the consolidation that has occurred in the last few years. Innovative online players like Laura Ashley can increase the effectiveness of their online marketing efforts and independent solutions like TagMan are crucial to putting control of tagging back into the hands of client advertisers.”

TagMan is an independent tag management solution that enables agencies and advertisers to manage online marketing tags/pixels – and the data they provide – much more effectively. (Tags/pixels are pieces of code used by the entire digital advertising industry to track the performance of online campaigns). A single TagMan tag is installed on any advertiser’s page that needs tracking and all other tags/pixels that need to sit on that page – whether to track natural search, paid search, affiliates, display or site analytics – are housed and managed through the TagMan tag and browser-based interface.

The system allows tags/pixels to be added, edited or removed direct from a web page in minutes – a process that can ordinarily take months – and enables marketers to track the full customer journey a customer takes to a website. This allows them to plan future activity more effectively and eliminate duplicate commission payments where more than one channel claims the same sale. Since tags/pixels can be easily added and removed, TagMan allows agencies and advertisers to move between tag providers such as ad servers and affiliate networks as they see fit.

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

TagMan (http://www.TagMan.com), the first independent tag and pixel management system, was built and developed by web analytics pioneer Paul Cook as a solution to the problems caused by the proliferation of website tracking tags and pixel weight. TagMan has revealed that up to 25% of a typical e-commerce advertiser’s commissions are duplicates.  TagMan instantly deduplicates sales and attribute credit in real time across ALL online channels so that for every $1 spent with TagMan, clients see up to a $9.50 return on their investments.  Existing platforms do not offer this conversion report. The negative impact of too many pixels on a client’s website (contributing to shopping basket abandonment) drove TagMan’s focus on latency and pixel reduction as a core part of the platform used by clients globally.

Founded in 2004, TagMan is privately owned and funded and has offices in New York and London.

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!