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.

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

TagMan CEO Paul Cook has contributed a key blog post to Econsultancy.com revealing how the way Google Analytics tracks natural search makes effective marketing attribution a rather challenging business for site owners.

Full post here: http://econsultancy.com/blog/3963-does-google-analytics-overstate-the-value-of-search

Just to let you know, Paul Cook has posted a piece on marketing attribution and tracking the path to conversion on his econsultancy blog – http://econsultancy.com/blog/3731-better-technology-better-marketing-attribution-4)

We’re pleased to annouce the beta version of above-the-fold detection support for TagMan view tags. TagMan view tags can be use to track ad views regardless of which ad server is being used. These tags provide a highly cost-effective (cheap!) way of tracking impressions in the path to conversion. The new release allows you to only count “views” on banners where the banner has appeared on the screen, traditional ad tracking counts views even if the ad is served off the bottom or side of the page and it is never scrolled on to. As well as on-screen tracking we also offer more qualified view-based conversions by allowing a window within which a user must engaged (visit the site) for a conversion to be counted. For example you may want to allow 24 hours for someone to start a quote and then 30 days for them to complete the transaction. We’re now beta testing the on-screen tracking with clients and look forward to reporting back the results in due course

TagMan’s brilliance is its ease of use. Once blank TagMan tags are installed on the site they can be configured to deploy any type of tag into the page, including those that require data to be coded in dynamically from the page. Adding, editing and removing tags can be done literally in minutes. This means no more waiting for site development cycles to come round to edit existing tags or install new ones.

Unlike the free ad server piggy-back tag solutions like Atlas UAT and DoubleClick Floodlight, TagMan can be used to deploy virtually any type of tag, including those for Web Analytics, Surveys and Multi-variant testing. Better still if these systems can share data captured from the page and by TagMan for maximum efficiency and better integration. 

Best of all TagMan can save companies thousands of wasted CPA. TagMan can track all forms of online marketing including display and natural search and can allow tags to be loaded based on the prior marketing activity. This enables companies to deploy solutions to help improve conversion for traffic responding to specific marketing campaigns as well as enabling CPA de-duplication. By only serving the tag for the company that generated the sale TagMan prevents two different CPA partners thinking they’ve generated the same sale making commission duplication a thing of the past.

TagMan makes installing new online marketing software easy. Let us enable you to take control of your online marketing performance.