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.

This post will identify the differences and why any marketer would actually need both an analytics solution and TagMan.

TagMan is an independent container tag solution.  Typically, it sits on every page within your website and will manage the serving of all your tags including campaign tags such as affiliate or PPC or email conversion tags; web analytics tags; multivariate testing tags from technologies like Optimost and retargeting tags from services like Criteo.

Via a user interface, you, the marketer can load up any of these tags passing any page parameters (such as basket values, departure dates, product IDs etc.) into the tags without needing the resource of your time-poor IT colleagues.

As part of the way TagMan works, it can track every event a user clicks or views including SEO and report that full path to conversion.  This is where I think the misconception of an overlap comes in.

The overlap misconception

The difference is that with web analytics, you retrospectively analyse the data to improve future media planning – possibly looking to attribute the credit of sales against the many campaigns a user has responded to.

With TagMan, while you still retrospectively analyse the data, you also set up an attribution model to run in real time.  On that cherished confirmation page, all the campaign tags are served conditionally through TagMan, and so depending on the campaigns the customer has responded to and the attribution model, TagMan will only serve the campaign tags which have led to the sale.

To make this seamlessly work with your CPA partners (such as performance marketing agencies or affiliate networks), TagMan goes a step further by intelligently serving the portion of campaign tags related to the portion of credit the campaign will get for each sale.

Example

By way of illustration, imagine a user clicks on a PPC link on Monday, clicks on an affiliate link on Tuesday, and clicks on an SEO link on Friday making a purchase of £90.  If you are running a flat attribution model – where the credit of the sale is split evenly by all the campaigns which drove the sale; on the confirmation page, TagMan will serve tags for all 3 campaigns, and in the case of the affiliate tag, pass a shopping cart value of 1/3 of the sale (ie £30).

In this instance, the affiliate is then able to claim their full commission on the revenue they collect through their tags and no negotiation is required after the event.

Without the tags being conditionally served, these campaign tags will be served for every sale, and the network will then claim for every sale which was generated by a click on their marketing.

Trying to develop a multiple awarding mechanism through web analytics would take analysis of each sale to calculate the correct portion of credit for each campaign, and then to present the findings to each network and partner to work out the commission payments.  All in all a fairly time consuming and messy way to work!

These include IndexTools, Omniture, ClickTale, Crazy Egg, Google Website Optimizer, Coremetrics, 4Q, Commission Junction, Affiliate Future, Kampyle and many more.  We’ll let you know as an when we update the support and add more vendors to our ever growing list!