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As marketers run more and more advertising channels in driving users to the website, they’ve rightly relied on tracking to identify what worked and what didn’t. The problem is they have been looking at the wrong thing and basing media decisions from the wrong perspective.

The last-click model has been the demise of many marketing channels which perhaps played a valuable part in the brand discovery or product selection process of the consumer. Once the consumer has decided what they wanted to buy, they’d typically go directly to the site (via a branded search term) and convert in that visit. As the last click, that branded search term would have been credited with the sale and all the valuable media they consumed in getting to that decision was ignored and not credited. This leads to money being directed away from valuable media and fed into the direct channels and very much away from profitability.

With our clients now basing media decisions on attributed data (where the credit of the sale is shared between all campaigns in the path to conversion), very different media decisions are being made and happily they are reporting a great increase in overall performance of their activity. Check out our new Boden attribution case study to see this in action.

Why it’s taken so long for the industry to grasp this with both hands I don’t know, but now the tide has changed this is excellent for marketers for a number of reasons:It makes marketing much more fun as you can try out lots of smaller channels using attributed data to show their true value

1. It makes the Web better as publishers can be more focused on providing the excellent content to capture the user’s interest rather than keep trying to get them to click through to an advertiser and buy right away
2. It will continue the growth in the digital marketing industry as ROI get higher and higher (perhaps to the detriment of the other traditional media)
3. Oh, and it will get you a promotion and that healthy bonus as you will see far greater returns for your marketing than before!

“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.

TagMan acts 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. A single TagMan container tag replaces all the tracking pixels on an advertiser web page used to track, for example, natural search, paid search, affiliates, display, email or site analytics. These tags are housed inside the TagMan container and can be managed directly through a browser-based interface.

Subaru is using TagMan as its global ‘container tag’, enabling its media agency, Carmichael Lynch, to track activity from display campaigns and paid and natural search and to see the entire path to conversion (including keywords used) that any user follows when taking action on its main brand website.

TagMan will also allow Subaru to control campaign tags across its dealer network websites according to various regional groupings of campaigns at any given time. Subaru will now be able to add, edit and remove tracking tags more efficiently and manage its future spend much more effectively.

“Subaru has a superb global reputation in the automotive industry. We are proud to have them part of the TagMan family,” says Jon Baron, general manager. “With all tags from all channels sitting in the same system, Subaru and Carmichael Lynch can track the full customer journey and see which channel(s) delivered a particular user. This allows marketing attribution of credit/commission across all online channels. As the company continues to deliver a high number of marketing campaigns, the flexibility and control that TagMan provides will enable Subaru to keep IT costs to a minimum and improve ROI.”

Subaru of America, Inc.. (www.subaru.com) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. of Japan. Headquartered in Cherry Hill, N.J., the company markets and distributes Subaru Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive vehicles, parts and accessories through a network of nearly 600 dealers across the United States. All Subaru products are manufactured in zero-landfill production plants and Subaru of Indiana Automotive Inc. is the only U.S. automobile production plant to be designated a backyard wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation

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 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 affiliate commissions are duplicates. Uniquely, TagMan instantly deduplicates sales and attributes credit in real time across ALL online channels so that for every $1 spent with TagMan, clients can see up to a $9.50 return on their investment.   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 US and Europe, 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.

The company, which employs 800+ staff and operates in the US, UK, Germany and Austria, will use TagMan to manage the tracking tags from search, display and affiliate campaigns on all its websites.

By plugging the third-party tracking tags from all its marketing channels into a single TagMan container tag on its pages, Boden will be able to follow the complete path to conversion that any of its customers take, including whether they come direct to the site or click or view on natural or paid search results, affiliate links or display campaigns.

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.

Oliver Elliott, online acquisition manager at Boden, said: “TagMan will give Boden’s marketing teams the power and flexibility to add and edit tracking tags as well as the rules governing their deployment. This can be carried out in minutes, whenever we or our partners require, without the need for scheduled updates to the website.

“Beyond tag management, TagMan will provide us with a rich source of touch-point data to better understand attribution and interaction across all online marketing channels.After a lengthy search, we’re confident that TagMan is the technology best placed to deliver this for Boden and are delighted to be one of the innovative businesses working with them.”

Jon Baron, general manager at TagMan, said: “Boden instantly and completely understood the potential benefits of using TagMan, especially where they have many sites to manage and campaigns from which to derive insight.”

About Boden

Boden is Britain’s best loved mail order clothing brand – selling womenswear, menswear, children’s and babywear through our catalogue, website and our two shops.We make well-made, colourful, flattering and fashionable clothes and accessories with a sense of fun and style at a fair price, delivered directly to your door.

Set up by Johnnie Boden in 1991, who was inspired by the high standards set by US mail order companies, Boden filled a gap in the UK market.Boden is now a £168 million turnover (2008) business employing approximately 800 staff.

The website was launched in 1999 (www.boden.co.uk) and is continually modernised: today 67% of UK sales and 75% of USA sales are taken over the internet.On average we’ll see around 330,000 visitors to the website every week in the UK and 190,000 in the US.

About TagMan

TagMan is a tag management system that solves the problems associated with site tagging and tracking of online marketing campaigns – including deduplication and marketing attribution – by acting as a single system and interface through which tags can be deployed to an advertiser’s web site.

Clients include advertisers Virgin Atlantic, Thomas Cook, and Alliance & Leicester and agencies Media Contacts, TBG London, Blue Barracuda and Didit.

It won the 2008 Econsultancy Innovation Award in the web analytics category where the judges said: “The creation of a single system and interface through which tags can be deployed is a significant innovation that can help remove the burden caused by the proliferation of tags as well as enabling complete campaign tracking.”

Find out more at http://www.tagman.com

TagMan’s appointment by Boden was covered in this news story by New Media Age