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1. Can the system manage all the tags you may want to deploy today?
Turns out there are a boatload of tags out there and at least 100 of them are used regularly by leading emarketers.   Think of it this way, if your tag management system doesn’t support all the tags you plan on tracking, there will be some gaping holes in your reports, greatly diminishing the value of the overall system.  Also, you don’t want to find out three months into it that you need a new system to manage more complex tags required for A/B testing, live chat, segmentation analysis, attribution and social widgets.

2. Is the vendor agnostic and independent?
Given the growing interest in tag management, a number of digital service providers including agencies, web analytics and ad servers have slapped on a simple container to their systems, hoping to help their clients manage tags. As convenient as this solution might seem, it’s a bit like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.  Each of these service providers has a vested interest in the results as well as an overwhelming desire to lock the client into their particular system.  A tag agnostic system that is independent of all the tag providers not only insures optimal data integrity but also makes it easier for clients to consider swapping ad servers and/or analytics providers.

3. Does the vendor have experience in your category?
In a category that is only four years old, there is a temptation to accept inexperience under the assumption that experience isn’t out there or that your particular situation is unique.  The reality is that tag management systems have now been deployed on over 100 leading global ecommerce sites.  These companies can tell you first hand that experience matters, that every category has its unique characteristics and there are a number of critical steps to achieving optimal results.  The right vendor will also understand and provide the service and support needed for a successful and timely launch.

4. Does the vendor have a vision for the future?
Tags aren’t going away in the foreseeable future but how they are managed and deployed will undoubtedly change a lot even in the next 12-24 months.  Without insights and a clear vision, the system you invest in today could be obsolete before you’ve even completed your implementation.  The challenge therefore is to find a system that has a strong foundational platform, one that anticipates and supports your future needs. And with rising concerns about privacy, it is essential that you work with a vendor that is not just fully compliant with the latest privacy standards across the globe but also can anticipate where privacy regulations are heading.

More and more, our industry is moving towards a data-driven media ecosystem with technical and regulatory challenges. As a result, there will continue to be more and more pixels, tags and widgets that you need to trial, and more digital touch points that you need to combine and track in one report. Investing time in researching tag management systems now will save you a lot of pain and money in the future.

Debenhams, the UK’s leading department stores group, is working with super container tag and tag management system TagMan to help it implement and track all its online activity.
The company, which operates online at www.debenhams.com, will use TagMan to track the entire path to conversion users take to buying from its online store, taking in exposure and interaction with display, paid and natural search, email and affiliate campaigns.

TagMan will become its global universal tag enabling the company to implement new tracking tags instantly, without using IT resources and plugging the tags from all campaigns into a single system for joined up reporting and analysis.

Simon Forster, trading director, at Debenhams, said: “We have made some fundamental changes to the way we measure the traffic to our site and TagMan is the natural step forward to help us to manage our online marketing campaigns. The system will give us complete control over our tracking tags and eliminate the cost of using a third party to do it for us.”

TagMan’s single page tag will house all the tags used to track Debenhams’ online campaigns, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and email, giving Debenhams’ marketing team a single view of the effectiveness of its online marketing activity. 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.

It will also eliminate duplicate commissions paid to affiliates by accurately identifying which partner delivered a sale.

Jon Baron, general manager at TagMan, said: “Debenhams is now free to use new marketing technologies that will improve their online results. TagMan will give the marketing department full control over its future campaigns and significantly reduce costs. ”

About TagMan
TagMan is the smart container tag for enterprise e-commerce. By acting as a single, independent, 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 capture the complete path to conversion. TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has offices in New York and London. Clients include Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Boden, Laura Ashley, Thomas Cook and Air New Zealand.

About Debenhams
Debenhams is a leading department stores group with a strong presence in lingerie retail, stocking brands like Wonderbra, Calvin Klein and Sloggi. Debenhams is also renowned in a number of other key product categories including women’s wear with dresses, bikinis, petite clothing, make-up, health and beauty, perfume, lingerie, jeans, mens fashion, home ware, accessories and children’s wear.

NEW YORK, NY (January 18, 2011) TagMan, the Tag Management System with real-time Attribution for enterprise e-commerce, today announced that (Mr.) Stéphane Hamel and Mike Peralta have joined the company’s advisory board.

The announcement comes on the heels of TagMan’s Series A funding round.

“Stéphane is  a leading voice in the enterprise analytics  technology community and Mike is a well respected leader in the data-driven ad tech media community,” says TagMan founder and CEO Paul Cook. “We are confident both will be valuable additions to our Advisory Board, on which we rely on for guidance and insight.”

As the creator of technologies that highlight tagging challenges such as WASP (Web Analytics Solution Profiler) and concepts such as Online Analytics Maturity Model,  Mr. Hamel will bring both the technology experience and Analytics community input that will allow TagMan to continue to seamlessly connect the off-site marketing/media vendors with on-site enterprise analytics tools. Mr. Hamel helps his clients understand the value of online optimization through analysis, is on the board of directors and treasurer of the Web Analytics Association where he is the winner of the Web Analytics Association’s Leadership and Technical Excellence Recognition.

Mr. Peralta is COO of search re-targeting business Magnetic and is an experienced media technology veteran respected by industry leaders for his experience in building data-driven ad-tech businesses; from revenue generation through to operations. Mr. Peralta previously was CRO at Tumri and SVP North American Advertiser Services at Platform A at AOL His experience and connections with media technology leaders will enable TagMan to further inform partners, globally how TagMan can enhance and connect intent/conversion data such as search retargeting, along with dynamic messaging to provide better optimization for client’s media campaigns

The other member of TagMan’s advisory board include Brendan Condon, Chief Executive Officer at REVShare; Calvin Lui, former President & CEO of data-driven platform Tumri; John Marshall, founder of ClickTracks and Market Motive, providing training courses and certification in online marketing; and Tom Sipple, a Vice President at Interactive Corporation

TagMan (www.TagMan.com) is the smart container tag for enterprise e-commerce that offers real-time attribution. By acting as a single, universal tag and interface through which tracking tags and pixels can be deployed, online marketers can save time and money in the way they implement, manage and track campaigns. TagMan goes beyond last-click by capturing the complete path to conversion of online customers and providing real-time attribution reports that alleviate discrepancies between display, CPA and PPC online advertising channels.

TagMan was founded in November 2007  with offices in New York & London. Clients include Ancestry.com, Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Allianz & Air New Zealand.  TagMan recently won the DPAC Award as the Best Advertising Analytics company as determined by peers in digital media and marketing.

Thanks to Marin Software, Criteo, MediaMath and eXelate for being part of the video.

For a recap on many of the tags that are running easily through TagMan, visit this post “what tags & pixels does TagMan work with?”

TagMan Study Finds That Problems With Ad Pixel/Tag Implementation and Management Plague Nearly All Sites Causing Loss of Traffic and Sales.

Other Negative Consequences Include: Loss of Campaign Performance Data; Delays in Launch of New Campaigns; Delays in Use of a New Marketing Technology.

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – September 20, 2010) – TagMan, the marketing tag management system that solves the problems associated with site tagging and tracking of online marketing campaigns through a single universal tag, today released the results of a survey of client and agency advertising executives around the globe that shows that almost all (99%) faced problems with ad pixel/tag implementation and management that are costing websites traffic and sales. Nearly 9 in ten (86%) of respondents have had tags implemented incorrectly on the sites they manage and three quarters (75%) had seen delays in the implementation of tags due to website development cycles. The implications of tag management issues among respondents included loss of campaign performance data (65%), delays in launch of a new campaign (63%), delays in use of a new marketing technology (58%), loss of website traffic (31%), loss of website sales (28%). Only 1% said they never faced tag management issues.

Almost a quarter (23%) of client and agency respondents spend more than $10 million per year on marketing technologies and services that rely on site tags but over a quarter did not know how much they spent on IT resource to implement tags.

“Unless you are in the IT department, there is a tendency to gloss over the problems of ad tag implementation and management, taking for granted that somehow ad tags are easily added or taken away without cost or consequence, but as our study shows, there are huge costs and potentially significant loss of revenue from poorly managed ad tags,” says Paul Cook, CEO of TagMan.

Nearly a third (30%) of respondents said it took a week to implement a new tag on the websites they managed. Nearly a quarter (24%) said the person responsible for tag implementation spent 1 to 2 days per month on the task. In more than half of cases (52%), tagging sits outside the control of marketers.

Other findings:

• More than a third (37%) of client advertiser and agency respondents have implemented more than 20 tags on the websites they manage in the last year
• Almost half (46%) of client and agency respondents said internal IT at the client advertiser was most responsible for the implementation of tags
• Universal tags reduce tag implementation times to a month for those that ordinarily take 1-3 months and to 1-3 months for those previously taking 3-6 months
• Direct IT costs for tag implementation are more than halved where universal tags are used

The survey was completed by more than 100 online advertising executives in a variety of roles, businesses and territories during July 2010.

View the main findings and request the full report

TagMan (www.TagMan.com) is the single-tag Tag Management System solution to the problems of online campaign tracking and slow pages loads due to excess tags. By acting as a single, universal tag management system 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, Ted Baker and Air New Zealand. TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has offices in New York and London.

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.

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 consider 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.