Good Health Media, Inc. Appoints TagMan

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.

The new BrightTag take on tag management has got us excited at TagMan Inc, USA, where we live and breathe tags, page speed and passing data between all systems. Their new angle/positioning on tag management; data and privacy control is interesting for everyone.

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 to (more…)

Chatting with a TagMan client (who I can’t name) about the attribution data we provide them, I was really impressed with the approach they have taken in assessing the quality (and ROI) of campaigns and how they use this data in their media planning.

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.

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.

Big thanks to the NMA awards judges and award sponsor DoubleClick for some great news for TagMan – the Special Award for Technical Innovation.

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.

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’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

Just thought I’d post what the e-consultancy Innovation Awards committee judges commented about the TagMan winning container tag solution: “The creation of a single system and interface through which tags can be deployed is a significant innovation which can help to remove the burden caused by the proliferation of tags as well as enabling complete campaign tracking.”

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…..

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.