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.

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.

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 toconsider 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.

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.

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

“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.

NMA summed up the evening’s events, stating that: ‘This year’s Special Award for Technical Innovation went to TagMan, the platform that provides a single-tag solution to the problems of online campaign tracking. Tagman, which works with brands including Virgin Atlantic, Boden and Thomas Cook, was deemed an “innovative solution for an increasingly challenging problem” by the judges.’

It was a great night and fantastic recognition of how we’re helping the online industry move forward. Congrats to all the shortlisted companies, ‘highly commended’s and winners on the night.

NEW YORK (June 16, 2010) TagMan, the tag management system that solves the problems associated with site tagging and tracking of online marketing campaigns, expanded its technical division by appointing Ave Wrigley, as its Chief Technical Officer and Tim Jones,  as Technical Operations Director. Both are newly created positions that will focus on the company’s system research and development.

“As the industry moves forward, with new and emerging platforms, Ave and Tim have the technical skills and expertise we need to develop the TagMan system for our users.  I am delighted to welcome them both as pivotal members of the team,” says Jon Baron, General Manager of TagMan.

Mr. Wrigley is the former head of technology at ITN ON, and was instrumental in developing the online division of broadcaster ITN, into a market leader in video content for web and mobile, supplying all media platforms. Prior to ITN, Mr. Wrigley worked in Speech and Natural Language research for Canon Research Europe, ETL in Japan, and Surrey and Bristol Universities. He has a PhD from Bristol (UK) University.

Prior to TagMan, Mr. Jones, an experienced and skilled manager for IT infrastructure and strategy, was a founding member of digital agency Profero and developed one of the fastest 3rd party ad server solutions within Europe. He was also a member of the New Media Advisory Board for Comic Relief, developing campaigns for Comic Relief and Live8.

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 $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. 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 2004, 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.

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.