Speaking at TagMan’s most recent client get together TagMeet 2, Silsbury said: “It’s going to be a pig of a year.” And none of the other retailers in the room looked ready to disagree.

So what does Glasses Direct plan to do about it? Given its focus is online, then drive its online channels hard. Efficiency is the overriding mission. But, that doesn’t mean the company isn’t prepared to invest to get as lean as possible. Silsbury has a couple of things in mind:

1. Data unity: Getting all his marketing data in one place so he can learn to optimise his spend against entire user journeys, not channel-by-channel
2. Conversion: Maximising things like site speed to make sure that any customers that do get to his website, buy – and buy big – before they leave

Both these causes are part of his justification for implementing TagMan at Glasses Direct. The system will be used to enable Silsbury and his team, including long-time TagMan user Oli Elliott – formerly of online clothes retailer Boden – to track the entire online path to conversion of customers and attribute credit for sales much more fairly across the channels that made a contribution.

Silsbury is also one of the first to use TagMan v3, the newest version of the software, which includes several world-first features to lighten the load that tracking tags place on websites, and speed up his website. Silsbury said initial tests showed a 25-28% decrease in page load speed.

“We are obsessed with site speed,” he said. “Apart from the obvious impact on user experience and site conversion, it is part of how Google ranks your website.”

Silsbury has committed to TagMan for other reasons too. He explained how “tagging is an unnecessary distraction” that hampers his team’s ability to implement new technologies and campaigns. Tag management enables them to focus on the things that matter.

But, the biggest challenge is attribution. Silsbury is keen to distinguish the use of attribution tools for understanding user journeys better and for optimising campaigns.

He explained: “For me it’s important to distinguish attribution from optimisation. We mainly use TagMan’s attribution data for reporting, but we want to optimise paths-to-conversion, not individual channels so we use ‘assisted views’ [reporting that shows when a channel appeared anywhere in a user’s journey to a sale] to optimise. The Unique User ID assigned in the system enables us to see any user’s complete path to conversion and so see how all channels work together. It’s important to know that investment in one channel may see the conversion take place in a completely different one.”

Silsbury stated that in reverse to the above, there are very real financial efficiencies to focus on too and attribution should be used to deduplicate and ensure that you are paying the right party for its part in a sale. Using email and affiliates as an example, Silsbury’s argument is that if a customer has been sent a Glasses Direct email, then they can’t be considered a customer 100% driven by the banner they clicked on [up to] 30 days earlier. He wants to focus affiliates on customer acquisition and therefore not pay 100% where email is present in the path. Silsbury was quick to add though that “this is not a money saving tactic, more a way of reinvesting the saving in areas like paid placements, which do deliver genuine value from the affiliate space.”

Silsbury closed by stating that the ultimate goal is “getting to a fractional model, where split percentages can be applied to individual channels dependent on their importance in the path.”

“Ultimately it is a question of understanding, as Oli puts it, the ‘golden combinations’ that drive sales. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there.”

Shanti Shunn, Director of Online Marketing at Harry and David

Shanti Shunn, director of online marketing at Harry and David, discusses why e-commerce sites need tag management, how tag management has evolved, and how to select a tag management vendor.

When and why did you decide you needed tag management?

At Harry and David we’re in all the multichannel markets, we have a lot of third-party tags on our site that relate to tracking and/or CPA payouts. I built my first tag management about 10 years ago, back when it was still called pixel wrapping. You had people who would touch multiple channels and check out, and you’d have multiple third-party tags firing. Based on them touching multiple channels, you’ve reported that order to multiple vendors.  And of course you’re reporting 100% of the order, so you have three different vendors who show the order as one of theirs.

It came down to attribution and at the same time order tallies based on the last channel touch. You don’t always want to optimize to that, but you want to facilitate the visibility.

So if you have multiple CPA vendors you’re reporting a percent of that order out, so you report that same $100 order to three CPA vendors and one’s 5%, one’s 10%, one’s 15%, you’ve respectively paid out three times on that order. Your margin goes out the door because you’re paying everybody, and you’re not paying for their contribution in closing that order, you’re paying them for the full order. Affiliates play a big part of that piece because you can’t send them a partial amount.

Can you estimate how much money you’re saving through tag management?

I would easily say more than a quarter million dollars in excess payouts. At my previous company we probably saved the company in excess of half a million to more than three-quarters of a million in the first year.

It ends up paying for itself, especially if you have a very robust affiliate program or you’re doing any type of CPA-based ad purchasing or CPA partnerships. You really only want to attribute and optimize based on their role, first in or last in. There’s a whole world of corrections and cancellations and fraud. If none of that existed, it probably wouldn’t be as good a deal. You have to have the ability to give that order a one-to-one relationship with a channel.

Interesting that you’ve been in the field of tag management for 10 years. How have things evolved?

Back in the day when affiliate programs were really starting to emerge and there were gobs of different networks out there you had a massive pool of CPA orders and more people doing CPA partnerships as more of an exploratory way to pre-test an agreement. One thing I noticed was that every time my confirmation page was loading I was using source code and broadcasting pixels to all my third parties. So I asked, “What do I need to do to clean this up?”

So the first incarnation of pixel wrapping was developed to say: if our system develops this source code as the final source code of record with this transaction, then it becomes associated with a pixel. That’s why it became called pixel wrapping. You associated whatever your onsite tracking mechanisms were to the different third-party pixels.

 Now there are new things bundled into tag management such as site speed, privacy, data collection. Do these features play an important role for Harry and David?

Site speed definitely is part of it. When I was doing the RFP for tag management one of the things I brought up was speed was not my main concern. There is a value to that, but it’s more of a side effect. Tag management has a lot more benefits than asynchronous loading. It’s going to save you money, give you a cleaner view of your business, give third party vendors and partners a clearer view of your business so they’ll be optimizing based more on real numbers.

Whereas if you have PPC advertising, there may be a lot of conversions, but those keywords might have been more of an influencer.

Speed is a benefit given the world we’re in, but I would never recommend somebody go to tag management simply to speed their site up another couple of seconds.

This is the first installment of a two-part interview. Come back next week for more!

Debenhams, the UK’s leading department stores group, is working with super container tag and tag management system TagMan to help it implement and track all its online activity.
The company, which operates online at www.debenhams.com, will use TagMan to track the entire path to conversion users take to buying from its online store, taking in exposure and interaction with display, paid and natural search, email and affiliate campaigns.

TagMan will become its global universal tag enabling the company to implement new tracking tags instantly, without using IT resources and plugging the tags from all campaigns into a single system for joined up reporting and analysis.

Simon Forster, trading director, at Debenhams, said: “We have made some fundamental changes to the way we measure the traffic to our site and TagMan is the natural step forward to help us to manage our online marketing campaigns. The system will give us complete control over our tracking tags and eliminate the cost of using a third party to do it for us.”

TagMan’s single page tag will house all the tags used to track Debenhams’ online campaigns, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and email, giving Debenhams’ marketing team a single view of the effectiveness of its online marketing activity. 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.

It will also eliminate duplicate commissions paid to affiliates by accurately identifying which partner delivered a sale.

Jon Baron, general manager at TagMan, said: “Debenhams is now free to use new marketing technologies that will improve their online results. TagMan will give the marketing department full control over its future campaigns and significantly reduce costs. ”

About TagMan
TagMan is the smart container tag for enterprise e-commerce. By acting as a single, independent, 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 capture the complete path to conversion. TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has offices in New York and London. Clients include Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Air New Zealand.

About Debenhams
Debenhams is a leading department stores group with a strong presence in lingerie retail, stocking brands like Wonderbra, Calvin Klein and Sloggi. Debenhams is also renowned in a number of other key product categories including women’s wear with dresses, bikinis, petite clothing, make-up, health and beauty, perfume, lingerie, jeans, mens fashion, home ware, accessories and children’s wear.

Hanna Kimuyu: Greenlight initially integrated TagMan data (client specific) to understand the relationship between paid and organic search, but have since expanded this into understanding the full user buying cycle. The data findings so far have confirmed our initial thoughts that the user doesn’t have a preference between paid or natural search when searching for products or services. In fact, the cross interaction between the two media, suggests that users are just focusing on their ‘search phrases’, and then picking the most relevant brand to buy with. Furthermore, as advertisers diversify their online strategies more, the conversation becomes bigger than just understanding the relationship between paid and organic search. Brands should be asking themselves ‘what is the relationship between all online channels’ ‘do I have the right media mix’ and ‘is my strategy cost effective’.

TM: How is Greenlight applying that insight to search strategies and tactics for its clients? Can you give any examples?

HK: Even though search marketing is over ten years old, most advertisers are still using the first or last-click model, meaning anything that happens in between is completely ignored. Having both full click and channel path data allows Greenlight to analysis the entire user search journey, from first click to conversion. Resulting in several things:

1. De-duplication of data, no more over paying affiliate commissions.
2. Introducing Attribution modelling, fairer way of awarding affiliate commissions and sales/revenue to contributing channels.
3. The importance of each channel, specifically the role each channel plays within the buying cycle.
4. Transparency of the full click/channel path, what are users doing, what search phrases are they using and what channels are they interacting with to find the most relevant product or service? Are there are patterns in how users search? Can we use this data to shape our online strategies?

Stage one is very much about discovery – understanding the data/making sense of it. It should be noted that this isn’t a quick process, and getting all the relevant people around the table to discuss and analysis the findings is critical. At this point it makes sense to apply a ‘version one attribution model’, which again will need to be discussed and evaluated before making any further changes. Although this may sound like a time and resource heavy exercise, it is beneficial. Our TagMan clients are seeing cost benefits in year one, and now have a transparent view of how their users interact between the channels before converting.

TM: Paid search listings are often accused of gaining disproportionate credit for sales thanks to the predominance of last-click models, and the channel’s intense measurability. What’s your view of that debate and is the TagMan data Greenlight sees providing any illumination?

HK: For a lot of advertisers paid search represents a larger proportion of their online advertising budget, suggesting almost a reliance on the channel. If this is the true, paid search represents a larger proportion of the sales because in most cases users will finish their search journey on a ‘branded click’ i.e. brand search term. Especially, if the advertiser is bidding on branded terms, then the last click model will of course favour paid search over the other channels. In this instance, this is very much down to the strategy in place and the fact the advertiser has chosen a last click model – hence why ‘paid search is often accused of gaining a disproportionate credit for sales’.

The TagMan data has been pivotal to highlighting the ‘real’ role brand and paid search (as a channel) plays in the entire user search journey. The trick is not to work to a last-click model continuously, but to start off with a last-click model as a benchmark before moving into attribution, so you can really appreciate what each channel brings to the overall picture. Having gone through the same exercise for a travel client, initially we discovered that, on the last-click model, paid search represented 29% of all sales (of which 22% were branded sales).

Having analyzed the full channel and click path (search only) data we then applied a fair attribution model, taking the decision to downgrade paid search branded sales. The outcome saw paid search still being the second biggest contributor, delivering 25% of all sales. Proving that paid search was working just as hard as the other channels, if not harder, to drive sales.

TM: How, specifically, are organic listings revealing themselves as drivers of customers through the purchase funnel?

HK: First and foremost we’re confidently tracking all organic listings. I have to point this out specifically because in most cases the traffic and sales resulting from organic listings are normally assumed from the ‘whatever is left’ bucket. To explain, most advertisers will tag their paid for online activity, that being paid search, display etc, therefore leaving a bucket of remaining traffic and sales. With TagMan, Greenlight has been able to identify Direct to Site (DTS) traffic, i.e. domain, bookmarking and organic traffic specifically. Allowing us to confidently understand what value organic traffic and optimisation brings to an overall search strategy.

There’s no one approach or outcome though, the value is completely is down to the intended strategy. Using the travel client mentioned above, their intention was to use organic search to pick up the long tail, e.g. ‘hotels in New York with a swimming pool, close to Central Park’. This search term might sound unreal, but when a user is close to converting or has a specific product in mind, the long tail proves quite useful.

Traditionally (and it’s still the case) paid search picks up on most of this traffic. Long tail search, although low in volume, is cheap and effective, normally resulting in a strong conversion rate. However, if you have the flexibility to create specific landing pages for these type of terms (to which the travel client mentioned did) then it also makes sense to drive your organic listing there as well. Especially if targeting some of the more competitive terms does not cost in. With this strategy in place the travel brand was able to see the value in building such landing pages, and the role organic search played to its overall strategy.

TM: What new insight have you been able to derive about the way in which different keyword groups drive people from research to conversion?

HK:
1. The less surprising lesson but most valuable is the fact that a buying cycle does in fact exist. Users will combine generics, e.g. hotels in London, with branded, e.g. Guoman hotels in London; with more product/service led searches e.g. conference hotels in London. There’s no bias towards paid or organic (natural) search. If the listing or advertisement is appealing and relevant, a user will click – it’s simple! It may sound strange to highlight this point, but advertisers still don’t appreciate the value in combining a range of research, consideration and branded terms when bidding via paid search or optimisation for organic search. Users have become more sophisticated when searching for a product or service, therefore if a brand wants to be considered, then they have to be present throughout the users search journey.

2. The biggest surprise has seen the average buying cycles almost doubling for both retail and travel. Typically an advertiser will set a cookie length of 30 days maximum to capture a user’s interaction before conversion. From recent analysis into both the retail and travel sectors, it has become apparent that user’s are taking longer to convert. Part of this can be explained in the click/channel path. Firstly, the number of channel interactions have grown; as well as the number of searches conducted. Secondly, the user is looking for a ‘bargain’ – even if they decide they want to buy from a particular brand, they will still search for discounts. Lastly, users are savvier at searching, although generics still rule in terms of the number of searches made per month (volume) – users are combining a range of keywords before converting.

TM: Can we offer any more insight into the debate around the way in which paid and natural search strategy can be better integrated to increase conversions and reduce cannibalization?

HK: Yes – position analysis as part of the attribution. One of the biggest debates in search is – what is the benefit of having both paid and organic search listings for the same search term? Although we’ve been able to prove cannibalisation when advertising on the same keyword for both paid and organic listings via an attribution model; this data doesn’t take into consideration the position of each listing. There are plenty of research studies that prove there is an uplift in click through rate if both paid and organic listings sit alongside each other. That said, what is the perfect position combination?

TM: As online retailers gain clearer sight of their customers’ entire paths to conversion, how do you see their approach to paid and natural search evolving?

HK: Revenue-driven strategies; as a result of having a clearer understanding of how and what to integrate, how do we develop a strategy that can almost predict a revenue outcome? Allowing advertisers to decide where and when to spend. Furthermore, search as a channel isn’t just about paid or organic search. Social media advertising channels such as Facebook’s Placement Programme, or Google’s Display Network (AdSense and Double Click collaboration) are also components of search. How is this changing the data and our view on how search is contributing to the wider picture?

Head of client sales Bertie Stevenson is taking the stage to reveal precisely how one of our clients has used TagMan to initiate a deduplication programme that has its affiliate partners on board and that makes sense for all parties.

It’s all taking place at Excel on the second day of the conference – 13 October, 2010. Details are:

17:15–18:00 Room 17 The implications of universal tagging and de-duplication for the affiliate industry. Bertie Stevenson, TagMan & Fiona Robertson, bigmouthmedia

Solutions such as TagMan are being used by advertisers to reveal the complete and precise path to conversion their customers take to a sale. This is enabling more accurate deduplication and long overdue insight into the role all channels play in contributing to a sale throughout a user’s online journey.

Bertie Stevenson, head of client sales at TagMan, will explain precisely how its clients are using the tool to drive greater effectiveness in their online spend and the major implications for the affiliate industry.

Hope to see you there and in the meantime you can see existing case studies of how advertisers are using TagMan in our Business Case section.

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).

Passive_Example

So – are you:

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.

It’s been great being the only agnostic tag platform for marketers and agencies for 3 years; but this new entrance from The BrightTag is good news for TagMan – and the industry.

Why?   Because it proves there is a market ready for vendor agnostic “Tag Management” now in the USA.    It means that Terence Kawaja’s chart  (no matter how hard to pigeon hole a tech) – may have to consider a new box or top row.   In it, could go TagMan, BrightTag and Tealium. Perhaps other great solutions such as Aggregate Knowledge and Demdex would float into it partly; but it would be a box and a market all the same.    A Tag is a Tag is a Tag and all tags need managing, independently without being tied to an ulterior up-sell motive; no matter what the acronym being used and whether it is server-side or browser call, pixel or javascript.  I can’t wait to hear what Terry would call the box, and therefore, the market.

If there is a market – and a box on a chart, it proves true that there is a consistent, genuine need.  A genuine ‘need’ means a line item on a budget sheet.    A line item on a budget means a thorough review of the differing systems, their heritage and experience.

In each experience, there is a very unique, client success story and specific problem that TagMan have solved over the years as our platform has evolved – with references and quotes to say same.  All this, is experience that TagMan are happy to explain and pass on to future clients to save THEM time and $. Indeed, even ‘we’ are still evolving in product AND marketing. EG – I know that @erictpeterson is now bringing me round to the idea that ‘Universal Tag’ is not the correct wording either (a tag is a tag is a tag). Now there is a market forming, I can understand Eric’s thoughts in that area. (You should try to get to the Semphonic Xchange conference if you can)

What this means:   Our experienced marketing, media and technology management , get to take the award winning market leader approach. We get to advise on questions that all advertisers and their agencies should ask of a tag based vendor/partner.

We get to discuss why, through trial and error – we settled on certain pricing models, certain script languages and certain interface and deployment methodologies. Because we have tried them all (ask us about freemium).   We get to talk about our research in this area, the complete list of tags that run through us or integrate with us, why clients talk about us, and why industry bodies feature our clients.

The best of it all -   we get to continue to focus on agnostically helping connect advertisers and agencies to technology vendors; without either falling over due to privacy or data challenges, because more people in our area of interest are helping to grow the market with us.

“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.

Web Analytics
AT Internet
Coremetrics
Google Analytics
IndexTools
Microsoft
Omniture
Unica
Webtrends

Display advertising/ad servers
Adconian
Advertising.com
Atlas
Blue Lithium
Doubleclick
Eyeblaster
Facilitate
Flashtalking
Mediaplex
Trip Advisor
Unanimis
ValueClick

Retargeting
Criteo
Infectious Media
Invite Media
Mediaplex
Right Media
Specific Media
Struq

PPC
Bing
Click Equations
Double Click
Google AdWords
iCrossing
Kenshoo
Marin
MSN
Yahoo

Affiliate
Adcell
Adconion
Adscale
AdTiger
Affiliate Future
Affiliate Window
Affilinet
Buyat
Commission Junction
Hotels Combined
iProspect
Linkshare
Mediastay
Metanetwork
Peak Point
Quown
Rupiz
TradeDoubler
Webgains
Xtendmedia
Zanox

Email
Cheetahmail
Email reaction
SilverPop

Other
Channel Advisor
Coomunicate
Do-Hop
edigital
eFrontier
Kelkoo
Lynku
Lyris/Clickstream
Nextag
Peerius
PriceGrabber
Qype
Returnity
Shopzilla
Z Mags
TravelSupermarket

New tags are being added all the time but it shows just how complex the world of tagging has become.

The work – which saw Thomas Cook save 25% on affiliate commissions by identifying precisely who delivered the last click – has been shortlisted in the annual Affiliates A4U Awards, in the Innovation Award for Advertisers category, which take place on June 9 at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

Thanks lots to the judges and we hope to see lots of friendly folk on the night.