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.

Below is the list so far of all the tags that TagMan clients currently have plugged into their websites through TagMan. It’s a long list and helps to demonstrate just how many systems rely on tags to work and why tag management has become a crucial issue for website owners. Remember, every tag you have on a page slows it down and each one reports data that could be even more useful if it was reported in the same place (and using the same rules) as all the rest.

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 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…

I was at a client meeting this week an the question of page download came up so I thought I’d jot down the answer here. TagMan consists of a JavaScript library and short amount of code that is included in each page. The library is standardised and shared across all clients so that users only download it once per session.

To prevent tags from slowing down the page, you can configure TagMan to writes out into an iframe instead of directly into the page.  The advantage of writing tags out into an iframe is they will not delay the page from completing like Javascript does.  If the business logic dictates that no 3^rd party tags need to be served, minimal code is sent back to the page, keeping bandwidth to an absolute minimum and reducing the impact on page download speed.  However, if page weight remains an issue you can always store a lightweight configuration in TagMan that you can roll back to in case of an emergency.

Is comprehensive one of those words like epic that are always overused?  It seems that lots of companies have the most comprehensive tag management solution on the market that can deliver any market tracking tag.  When it comes down to the crunch, however, a lot of solutions have real problems incorporating some tracking solutions such as Google Analytics.

TagMan can claim to be fully comprehensive because it can deploy other piggy-back solutions, whereas you can’t use them to deploy TagMan! 

Mix this with the fact it can deploy javascript based tag solutions, de-dupe based on post impression click or view activity and set conditional first/last click rules for completed actions and comprehensive is very much the word.

No client wants a webpage to hang, appear blank, not load or redirect to another page.  Tagging mistakes are easily made, and usually only noticed once live and when you need to generate a report.  TagMan provides comprehensive change control so you can instantly roll back to a previous configuration, test changes on a staging server and then be deployed live by users with the correct permissions.  This is all the while providing accountability by logging who is updating what.

Also, because tags are launched via TagMan, should a particular vendor tag be slowing page load it can easily be removed at the click of a button through the TagMan interface rather than having to ask the webmaster to remove it. 

Or even better, how about being able to set an end date against a vendor tag so that it’s automatically removed without you having to remember to remove it or do anything else.

TagMan will save you time. Being in control of the tagging process means that there will be fewer mistakes and improved accuracy, now that’s got to be a good thing……….