I just wanted to point you towards the e-consultancy Q&A interview with Paul Cook the TagMan CEO.

It makes interesting reading and covers topics surrounding the de-duplication of marketing payments and how TagMan can assist with our container tag solution that can track all channels, including display and affiliates as well as both paid and natural search. Definitely worth a read…..

How much are you over-paying on duplicate marketing commissions? Do you know which of your online marketing partners are charging you for the same lead or sale, and how much it’s costing you?

We believe that the rate of duplication is on average between 20%-25%, but we’ve heard of clients who could be over-paying to acquire as much as a 1/3 of all their traffic and online sales.

That’s why we’re offering* to de-duplicate all CPA activity (including natural search, banners and affiliate de-duplication), and identify which channel is actually responsible for each lead or sale, up until Christmas; in return for a share of the savings made on commission payments.

This could potentially save a lot of time, effort, and money. Best of all this is a risk-free offer that means you don’t have to pay us anything unless we help you to save money with our tagging solution.

* Terms & Conditions apply. Go to www.tagman.com/pf_de-dupe_free_offer for further information.

A lot of client discussions regarding tag management recently have covered the conditional tag serving of TagMan so thought it was worth giving a quick overview.  TagMan can be configured with a number of tagsets each delivering a different vendors tag into the container tag (e.g affiliate network pixels, if affiliate de-duplication is the goal). The user configuring TagMan can decide whether the tag should be served at all times or conditionally, depending on the campaign that was responsible for delivering the user and thus providing CPA de-duplication.

The campaign setup can also include natural search tracked as an impression and paid search tracked as a click to ensure priority campaigns have a greater level of traction.  Different campaigns can be allocated different lengths of window for a user to arrive at the site (if tracking views) or to return and convert depending on the rules set in the interface. 

TagMan uses cookie data that is created when a user views or clicks on TagMan tracked media, to decide which tagset to deliver into the container tag, and therefore only delivering the relevant tag for the action that has occurred. This allows you control the online marketing campaigns and the valuable data associated with those conversions.

I would guess that most clients are paying far too much in commission payments to multiple marketing partners and vendors for a single lead or sale and that this is the norm rather than the exception.

I was in a meeting today with a large media agency (modesty forbids etc.) talking about de-duplication, and they were outraged that affiliates could tag both links on an affiliate network and redirect through these to claim double commissions. They also conservatively (small “c”) estimated that they were overpaying affiliates by 30%. As digital marketing budgets rise even in the current economic climate, that means more and more revenue is being wasted.

Whether the norm or not, for those clients that are, saving money by reducing over-payments on duplicate solution commissions is critical, and an easy win for increasing ROI of marketing spend.  That can only be a good thing.

So what’s the answer? Well I reckon one way is to serve conditional tags onto a page based on who the referrer or owner of the “lead” is. This means that only relevant tags are served when and where needed, reducing the over-delivery of marketing tags that aren’t. So – only the correct referrer gets counted for the lead. And it’s only them that get’s paid! And there you go: de-duplication and the elimination of duplicate affiliate comissions in one nice, neat, easy solution. BTW – a nice by-product of this is that you also get extra data protection, because only the referrer gets to track and count the tag.

De-duplication of media and the delivery of any market tracking tag are key features of TagMan. They can directly save clients money and make the whole online marketing ecosystem more accountable.