Sallie Stokes has joined TagMan from business social networking powerhouse LinkedIn. (See separate press release) Here she explains why.

Q: LinkedIn is an immensely successful company at a very exciting time. Why the switch?

A: I joined TagMan because of the huge opportunity to educate the market on how they can, not only save money, but also make money from tracking and understanding their ROI from their marketing budgets. In uncertain economic times, I am excited to take on the new challenge to help marketers make their budgets work smarter for them.

Q: How critical is account management for a technology provider?

A: I believe account management is the heart for any technology provider. Being the point of contact for clients, it is our responsibility to provide market and product feedback to the development team, ensuring the evolution of our technology and the industry. On the other hand, it is also important to educate clients on how the industry is changing and making sure they are up to date with the latest developments.

Setting the bar for service and high-level client satisfaction, in addition to the technology, will allow the company to stand out from the competition.

Q: What are the keys to successful digital account management?

A: Successful account management starts by listening and understanding our clients’ key business objectives for tag management and the challenges they face in meeting them. Once this has been established, together with our clients, we develop a strategy and set-up to ensure clients KPIs are met and over achieved. With clear deliverables and benchmarks along the way, trust and solid relationships will be developed from both sides.

Q: What makes a good account manager?

A: Having the ability to listen and understand with a genuine passion to help clients achieve their goals and the industry to develop. By being honest, knowledgeable, approachable and, of course friendly, will enable an account manager to develop into a trusted advisor role and become successful in their career.

Q: How aware were you of TagMan and tag management in general before joining the company?

A: Having been in the industry for over 12 years, I have seen tag management evolve and become a must-have for marketers. I have always been interested in the relationship between all marketing activities, understanding the value and being able to reward accordingly. TagMan being the first, most used and most advanced Tag Management system has always had my interest.

Q: What are the main issues you think you’d like to address at TagMan?

A: TagMan has seen tremendous growth in the past year and 2012 will see that growth continue. By redefining the roles and responsibilities within the Account Management Services team it will enable us to work closer with our clients, understand their business objectives and enable us to scale both in the UK and across Europe.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you think you’ll face in your new role?

A: I think the biggest challenge is also the biggest opportunity. Educating the industry on why they should be looking at the path to conversion on every sale and the benefits of real time marketing attribution.

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.

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.

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

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

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.