Q: Why do you think analysts like Forrester and Gartner are now turning their attention to Tag Management?

A: I think they are acknowledging that the online marketing technology stack is broken and holding back the industry. Tagging has been a pain-point for many years and we are reaching a tipping point in terms of people recognizing this an area they should be investing in. Before TagMan launched in 2007 people thought tagging was an insolvable problem. We showed how the problem could be solved and tags could become enabling rather than disabling and our growth rate speaks for itself.

Q: How do you feel about Forrester’s Website tagging audit?  Or do you think this is a valuable exercise for enterprise ecommerce companies?

A: The audit is a great way to get people thinking about the problem. I think the scoring on load time question is a little high, anything over 10% for tags to me is too high. In terms of the overall score, Tag Management is really something for larger enterprises right now, although the audience is quite self-selecting as if you subscribe to Forrester you’re probably of a large enough scale to get good ROI.

Q: Forrester sites a number of benefits to tag management including accuracy, efficiency, freedom, restoring ownership to measurement experts, stewardship, enhanced page load performance—did they miss anything? Or do you think some of these are more important than others?

A: I’m an entrepreneur so freedom will always be important to me. I like to be able to work with which every suppliers and to be able to use urgency as part of my negotiation. We can implement / remove you tomorrow is a good bargaining chip. I also like to get the absolute most out of the products I invest in, that means getting them up and running quickly and tweaking them so they are just right. I hate waste, and what greater waste than the time invested in a failed Web analytics implementation let alone the six figure contract.

The key driver in the US market is undoubtedly performance. Latency is a bigger issue in the US due to the physical size of the country as much as anything else. Companies have made significant investments in accelerating their web servers but there has been little they can do about 3rd party assets until now. Sears recently took the tags off their website and found a significant increase in conversion rate by taking tags off that shouldn’t have been there but doing that can only take you so far.Accelerating tags will become the new must-have feature for a TMS.

Q: Forrester bundled TagMan into something they called “the nascent tag management system landscape.”  Do you agree with this characterization of the category you created?  With over 100 website installations, isn’t TagMan well beyond nascent?  

A: Well certainly analysts understanding on the space in Nascent! But seriously, Europe and particularly UK is significantly ahead of the US in this area. For example we have 3 of the top 4 high street multi-retailers on TagMan whereas the equivalent companies here are still testing the water with limited Proof Of Concepts (POCs). Our business really took off once competitors entered the market which help clients to compare and contrast. We’ve seen a significant shortening of sales cycles in the US since Ensighten and BrightTag entered the market late last year.

Q: Forrester points out that there is some risk in adopting a TMS because is “places an intermediate step between the web site and the tags, creating a potential point of failure.”  How big a risk is this? Have you seen any instances when this has happened?

A: I’d rather have a single point of failure than 20. That allows me to focus so I know where to be looking. Not wishing to tempt fate but TagMan has not failed since it launched 4 years ago. We have a lot of redundancy built into our architecture and our global scale has allowed us to add more layers to this.

There are two risks, one that tags aren’t delivered but second that the TMS fails to load entirely. Clearly neither are ideal but if a synchronous JavaScript call fails then that can hang the entire site. When we ran our Tag Management Survey last year around 30% of companies reported loss of site availability due to tags. We’ve now reached a point with our technology where we can completely remove this risk and we are unique in that regard.

The issue of tags not getting loaded is an interesting one. Most companies will offer an SLA in the 99%+ range so well within acceptable limits. The real problem is what latency will be added by the Tag Management System. Our 2008 study showed that traffic drops off a page at the rate of 1% per 100ms so loading the tags at the top versus the bottom can make a major difference. We generally find a couple of percent difference with our v2 product but our v3 product can typically improve data collection so watch this space for that announcement!

Q: Forrester notes that some vendors are “analystic-focused while others are marketing focused”  — which focus does TagMan take and why do you believe that’s a smarter approach?

A: I think this is more a reflection of where some of these products come from, essentially products spun out of web analytics professional services companies.  This is something of a double-edged sword because it makes the other Ominiture shops wary about working with them.  TagMan itself solves both challenges. Having different tag management systems for marketing and analytics makes no sense and the opportunity to resolve discreprencies, reduce the burdon on IT ect are lost. We do both because we’re bigger and have been around longer, it’s normal for new competitors to position themselves as more niche but I wouldn’t want to pay 50% less for 20% of the functionality and it would seem a niche within a niche! My previous start-up was a high-end, tag heavy, web analytics platform so we know all about those challenges. We have over 180 different vendors running through TagMan today and there are numerous case studies including Omniture and Coremetrics. We’re committed to global leadership, that means support for any tag in every market.

• Adding and changing tags is a growing burden on the IT department
• The current process for changing tags is highly inefficient
• High probability of duplicate and outdated tags
• If the tags are wrong, so is the data they are supposed to provide

You need to determine the full extent of your tagging problem
In the white paper, Stanhope provides a relatively simple web site tagging audit that makes it easy for you to determine how tags currently impact your website. Using a 1-3 point system, the audit asks the reader to consider six key categories:

• Number of JavaScript tags
• Time required to add/change tags
• Frequency of additions/changes
• Number of parties involved in tag management
• Overall site complexity
• Impact of tags on page load time

Forrester sites a number of benefits of tag management systems
Not surprisingly, for those that do the audit and end up with a high score, Forrester recommends investing in a tag management system. (Thank you Forrester—we couldn’t agree with you more!) Here are some of the benefits of deploying a tag management system sited in the white paper:

• Increased accuracy of analytical data
• Increased efficiency when changing/managing tags
• Reduced reliance on any one supplier for data
• Puts tag management in the hands of those that need the data
• Enhanced page load performance since unmanaged tags slow pages down

Forrester includes TagMan among leading Tag Management System vendors
Forrester lists five tag management system vendors including TagMan without showing preference to any of us. We appreciate their unbiased approach since this makes their white paper that much more credible. And as the global leader in tag management, we hope you’ll enjoy your free copy, do the audit and then give us a shout.

Start the survey now and have a chance to win a $25 iTunes voucher:  http://svy.mk/mFGvD9

“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.

Web Analytics
AT Internet
Coremetrics
Google Analytics
IndexTools
Microsoft
Omniture
Unica
Webtrends

Display advertising/ad servers
Adconian
Advertising.com
Atlas
Blue Lithium
Doubleclick
Eyeblaster
Facilitate
Flashtalking
Mediaplex
Trip Advisor
Unanimis
ValueClick

Retargeting
Criteo
Infectious Media
Invite Media
Mediaplex
Right Media
Specific Media
Struq

PPC
Bing
Click Equations
Double Click
Google AdWords
iCrossing
Kenshoo
Marin
MSN
Yahoo

Affiliate
Adcell
Adconion
Adscale
AdTiger
Affiliate Future
Affiliate Window
Affilinet
Buyat
Commission Junction
Hotels Combined
iProspect
Linkshare
Mediastay
Metanetwork
Peak Point
Quown
Rupiz
TradeDoubler
Webgains
Xtendmedia
Zanox

Email
Cheetahmail
Email reaction
SilverPop

Other
Channel Advisor
Coomunicate
Do-Hop
edigital
eFrontier
Kelkoo
Lynku
Lyris/Clickstream
Nextag
Peerius
PriceGrabber
Qype
Returnity
Shopzilla
Z Mags
TravelSupermarket

New tags are being added all the time but it shows just how complex the world of tagging has become.

To prevent tags from slowing down the page, you can configure TagMan to writes out into an iframe instead of directly into the page.  The advantage of writing tags out into an iframe is they will not delay the page from completing like Javascript does.  If the business logic dictates that no 3^rd party tags need to be served, minimal code is sent back to the page, keeping bandwidth to an absolute minimum and reducing the impact on page download speed.  However, if page weight remains an issue you can always store a lightweight configuration in TagMan that you can roll back to in case of an emergency.

Also, because tags are launched via TagMan, should a particular vendor tag be slowing page load it can easily be removed at the click of a button through the TagMan interface rather than having to ask the webmaster to remove it.

Or even better, how about being able to set an end date against a vendor tag so that it’s automatically removed without you having to remember to remove it or do anything else.

TagMan will save you time. Being in control of the tagging process means that there will be fewer mistakes and improved accuracy, now that’s got to be a good thing……….