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.

TagMan’s work for Thomas Cook in helping the travel giant with its affiliate deduplication has been recognised by the Affiliates A4U community.

The work – which saw Thomas Cook save 25% on affiliate commissions by identifying precisely who delivered the last click – has been shortlisted in the annual Affiliates A4U Awards, in the Innovation Award for Advertisers category, which take place on June 9 at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

Thanks lots to the judges and we hope to see lots of friendly folk on the night.

Virgin Atlantic is working with tag management system TagMan to help it manage and track the online campaigns it has running across all its websites, which cover 25 markets around the world.

The company has appointed TagMan as its global ‘container tag’, a single page tag that houses all the tags used to track Virgin Atlantic’s online campaigns, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and email.

Veronica Brown, e-commerce commercial manager at Virgin Atlantic, said: “We are pleased to be working with Tagman as this system will enable Virgin Atlantic to add, edit and remove tracking tags more efficiently and, in so doing, save huge amounts of time and energy in the implementation and management of campaigns.”

The system will also allow Virgin Atlantic and its partners to see the entire path to conversion that any user takes to buying from one of its sites. Brown said this will enable them to be smarter about how they apportion future spend and ‘deduplicate’ between channels that claim commission from the same sale. The company will gain instant savings in this way.

Brown commented: “Being able to quickly amend our tracking tags is key for us, as globally we continue to deliver a high number of marketing campaigns. We are very excited about the flexibility and control that TagMan will give us to ensure we are able to track and attribute accordingly.”

Virgin Atlantic is the latest e-commerce giant to sign up to TagMan to get on top of the huge number of tracking tags now sitting on e-commerce sites. Thomas Cook, Alliance & Leicester and many others also use the system to manage the way they implement and track online campaigns.

Jon Baron, general manager of TagMan, said: “Just on a practical level Virgin Atlantic will save time and money in the way it implements and tracks its campaigns. But, the company is also keen on the strategic edge it will gain by having a central, ‘ultimate tag’ that is independent of tag providers and which puts control of the data that tags provide back in its hands.”

About Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic celebrated its 25^th birthday this year and since it was founded the airline has become Britain’s second largest carrier serving the world’s major cities. Now based at both London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports, it operates long haul services to thirty destinations world-wide as far apart as Las Vegas and Shanghai.

Virgin Atlantic has enjoyed huge popularity, winning top business, consumer and trade awards from around the world. The airline has pioneered a range of innovations setting new standards of service, which its competitors have subsequently sought to follow. Despite Virgin Atlantic’s growth the service still remains customer driven with an emphasis on value for money, quality, fun and innovation.

About TagMan

TagMan is an independent tag management solution that enables agencies and advertisers to manage online marketing tags – and the data they provide – much more effectively.

By acting as a single system through which tags can be deployed to an advertiser’s web site, online marketers can regain control of their marketing data, track users throughout their path to conversion and make immediate savings in the way they add, edit and remove online tracking tags on their websites.

Clients include online advertisers and agencies in the UK, US and Germany, including Thomas Cook, Alliance & Leicester, Christy Towels, Media Contacts, TBG London, Blue Barracuda and Didit.

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

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…..

The TagMan de-duplication survey results have been announced with very interesting results.  Our industry-wide duplication survey showed that 40% of companies said between 11% and 20% of commissions were duplicate payments. Almost 20% said that between 21% and 30% were duplicated. 

40% of respondents stated that responsibility for de-duplicating commission payments should lie with the marketing/media agency, with 34% indicating the technology provider. 

Full results will be available next week through the TagMan website and also available now is an interesting overview on the e-consultancy website.

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.

As we get this blog up and running I just wanted to introduce you to the concept of TagMan.  TagMan is a universal tagging system that enables Web site administrators, advertising and marketing teams and media agencies to manage, track and control all of their tagging needs with the use of one single tag. 

A single TagMan tag can house multiple tagging solutions to de-duplicate all online performance marketing and make the tagging process much simpler. You can track all your marketing channels, natural search included, and compare them side-by-side for response attribution modelling. 

Our aim is to make sure TagMan works with all tag based online marketing solutions, including content optimisation and web analytics. Currently we support major vendors like Atlas, DoubleClick and Google Analytics but support can be added easily for all of the tag-based solutions we’ve seen so far.

TagMan fills the gap between Ad Serving, Content Management and Web Analytics. Take control of your online marketing performance…