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.

Air New Zealand is working with TagMan, the universal tag, to manage and track the online campaigns it has running across its European websites.

TagMan replaces Air New Zealand’s existing site analytics system as the company’s universal container tag, a single page tag that houses all the tags used to track Air New Zealand’s online campaigns, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and site analytics on these sites. The system will allow Air New Zealand to view customer journeys,   tracking the entire path to conversion that any user takes to buying from one of its European sites. TagMan will enable future spend with affiliates to be apportioned more accurately, ‘deduplicating’ between channels that claim commission from the same sale. The company will gain instant savings in this way.

Chris Sumbler, online marketing manager at Air New Zealand, said: “Our previous tagging solution did not enable us to be as nimble as we would have liked in implementing new site tagging and testing innovative digital platforms. TagMan has solved this issue while also enabling us to use dynamic attribution and path to conversion analysis in order to more accurately measure the return on investment from each of our marketing channels.”

Jon Baron, general manager of TagMan, said: “TagMan was developed to remove the problems associated with site tagging and campaign management as well as reducing costs to advertisers.  Air New Zealand is now free to use new marketing technologies as they see fit.”

About Air New Zealand

Air New Zealand is an international and domestic airline group which provides air passenger and cargo transport services within New Zealand, as well as to and from Australia, the South West Pacific, Asia, North America and the United Kingdom.  It has 12 flights a week from London Heathrow to Auckland, New Zealand via either Los Angeles or Hong Kong.  www.airnewzealand.co.uk

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. TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has 5 offices across the US and the UK. Clients include Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Santander.

www.tagman.com

NEW YORK (June 30, 2010) TagMan, the ad tag management system that solves the problems associated with site tagging and tracking of online marketing campaigns through universal- or server side- tag solutions, today announced the further expansion of its US-based team by naming Wendy L. Zenchyshyn Vice President  of Business Development and Aaron K. Gragg as Vice President of Sales, two newly created positions.

“Wendy is a proven strategic-thinking, results-oriented professional with years of sales and marketing experience with technology companies and Aaron is experienced in web content management, social computing and measurement, web analytics, document management, personalization/content delivery, and other aspects of enterprise content management,” says Jon Baron, General Manager of TagMan. “They will both be invaluable new members of the TagMan team as we continue to ramp up in the US market.”

Before coming to TagMan, Ms Zenchyshyn had been with Enquisite Search Analytics (San Francisco) as Director of Strategic Partnerships since May 2008 and where she developed strategy including SaaS pricing models and marketing programs to effectively recruit large advertising agencies and direct advertisers focused on search engine marketing. From August 2007 to May 2008, Ms Zenchyshyn was Director, Business Development for Lyris, Inc. managing technology partners whose products were integrated into Lyris’ solutions. Before that, she was for four years Director, Worldwide Channel Sales for ClickTracks Analytics (which was acquired by Lyris, Inc.).

Earlier in her career Ms Zenchyshyn was a Regional Account Manager for WebTrends Corporation; a Channel Sales Manager – International for VPNet Technologies (Avaya); the Director, Global Channel Sales for Mobile Automation, Inc,;  Channel Sales Program Manager for Cisco Systems and spent ten years with Merisel, Inc  in positions of increasing responsibility and authority, the last being Director Worldwide Sales Services, Product and Marketing. She is graduate of Waterloo, Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University.

Mr. Gragg comes to TagMan from WebTrends (Portland) where he has been a Strategic Account Executive since May 2008 responsible for $4.2 million in software and on demand sales for enterprise web analytics in Southeastern US. Prior to that, he was a Regional Sales Manager for RedDot Solutions/Hummingbird/Open Text from 2004 to 2008 and before that, a Financial Services Practice Manager at Verian Technologies. Earlier in his career, Mr. Gragg was an Account Executive with FileNet Corporation and served in sales and sales management positions with eGrail, Interwoven, Parametric Technology Corporation and the Mars Mission Research Center. He holds Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from N.C. State University.

TagMan (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 of implementing new tracking tags on advertiser websites. TagMan has revealed that up to 25% of a typical e-commerce advertiser’s commissions are duplicates.  TagMan’s universal tag solution  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 $41 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. Clients include online advertisers and agencies in the UK, US and Germany, including Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Alliance & Leicester.

Founded in 2007, TagMan is privately owned and funded and has offices in New York and London. It has received funding from Cambridge Angels and the London Business School E100.

Clients of TagMan recently discovered that, since the system enables you to gain visibility of on-site search terms in real time, the Icelandic volcano spewed out more than air-traffic hindering ashes.

There was – on travel retailer sites specifically –  an astounding amount of new keywords that were quite unique – seeking advice on airline and holiday bookings in the context of the ash cloud.

With site analytics tags plugged in through TagMan, they were able to see this new range of search terms immediately and adjust their site content, first to provide the right advice for customers and, second, improve their natural search rankings on the new keywords.

Every fresh air-traffic shutdown as the winds push the ash cloud across Europe are making these steps regularly useful.

NEW YORK (February 15, 2010)  TagMan, the one-tag/pixel solution to the problems of online campaign tracking, today announced it has closed a first-round of external financing led by Cambridge Angels and the London Business School E100.

Cambridge Angels investors include John Taysom, whose early stage internet investments include Advertising.com, Yahoo!, Forbes.com and infoseek and Andy Phillipps, formerly CEO and co-founder of Active Hotels. As part of the current funding round, TagMan adds to its Board of Directors: Robert Brady, founder of Brady plc, a software solutions business and a Cambridge Angel, and John Yeomans, director of First Capital and both a Cambridge Angel and London Business School E100 member.

The round also includes new investments from existing employee investors, including CEO and founder Paul Cook and co-founder and general manager Jonathan Baron. The company had previously raised a total of $800,000 angel funds from friends and employees.

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.

Tagman clients include online advertisers and agencies in the US and Europe, including Virgin Atlantic, Boden, Thomas Cook and Media Contacts.

“TagMan is growing quickly as we remove one of the most significant barriers to smarter online marketing – tag management and tracking,” says Mr. Baron. “This investment will be used to scale our business by continuing to grow our client support and product development teams and expand our already significant operations in the US market.”

“TagMan enables advertisers and their agencies to switch at will between any technology supplier, for example ad server, analytics provider and display network, which is key,” says John Taysom. “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. 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. TagMan will help to drive innovation in the market.

“We were impressed how the powerful combination of pain-free tag management and a single view of the entire customer journey is already driving amazing returns for its clients. They can implement new campaigns immediately, plan their marketing spend more effectively and instantly save money by removing duplicate commission payments,” adds Mr. Taysom. “This new investment will enable this remarkable business to expand its operations to meet client demand and continue to drive the product and client support in the US and Europe.”

The Cambridge Angels are a group of high-net worth investors who have proven experience as successful entrepreneurs in technology and bio-technology. Members invest in and mentor high quality start-up and early-stage companies in these sectors. Members have been responsible for a large number of the “Cambridge Phenomenon” success stories over recent years. Therefore, in addition to providing funding for early-stage companies, the Cambridge Angels also offer start-ups the considerable benefit of a wide range of expertise, contacts and directly relevant experience in establishing and growing entrepreneurial businesses successfully.

The London Business School Enterprise 100 is an angel investor network comprised of high net worth individuals affiliated with the London Business School. Enterprise 100 has played an integral role in establishing the School as a centre of entrepreneurial excellence.

Launched in 1999, the club has evolved to become a fundamental part of the bridge between what’s happening in the classroom, the School’s successful entrepreneurs and the business community at large. Set up to extend the School’s association with the world’s leading entrepreneurs, and operating within the School’s Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the club already has over 90 members and always welcomes new applications.

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.

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

1) Tags really do slow down your page

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

2) Tag position needs careful consideration

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

3) Page optimisation is critical

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

4) IFrame container tags suffer the most

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

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

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 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 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