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.

Big thanks to the NMA awards judges and award sponsor DoubleClick for some great news for TagMan – the Special Award for Technical Innovation.

NMA summed up the evening’s events, stating that: ‘This year’s Special Award for Technical Innovation went to TagMan, the platform that provides a single-tag solution to the problems of online campaign tracking. Tagman, which works with brands including Virgin Atlantic, Boden and Thomas Cook, was deemed an “innovative solution for an increasingly challenging problem” by the judges.’

It was a great night and fantastic recognition of how we’re helping the online industry move forward. Congrats to all the shortlisted companies, ‘highly commended’s and winners on the night.

Clients of TagMan recently discovered that, since the system enables you to gain visibility of on-site search terms in real time, the Icelandic volcano spewed out more than air-traffic hindering ashes.

There was – on travel retailer sites specifically –  an astounding amount of new keywords that were quite unique – seeking advice on airline and holiday bookings in the context of the ash cloud.

With site analytics tags plugged in through TagMan, they were able to see this new range of search terms immediately and adjust their site content, first to provide the right advice for customers and, second, improve their natural search rankings on the new keywords.

Every fresh air-traffic shutdown as the winds push the ash cloud across Europe are making these steps regularly useful.

Single Tag Online System to Track Online Sales

and Manage Ad Tags On Lauraashley.com

NEW YORK (March 3, 2010)  TagMan, the one-tag/pixel solution to the problems of online campaign tracking, today announced that fashion and home furnishings retailer Laura Ashley has implemented TagMan on Lauraashley.com. The TagMan system, which enables all ad tracking tags on a site to be housed and managed through a single tag, will be used to reveal the click-path any customer makes in buying from the site. This will make campaigns easier to implement and for commission payments to be attributed with greater accuracy.

“Without TagMan, marketers can’t plan their campaigns based on a true understanding of customer behavior, the channels that work, and how they perform together. Industry experts estimate that, there is 20%-30% waste in current budgets,” says Jon Baron, general manager of TagMan. “TagMan levels the playing field enabling marketers to choose the technologies that best suit their business, rather than being tied into the large incumbent players that dominate online advertising following the consolidation that has occurred in the last few years. Innovative online players like Laura Ashley can increase the effectiveness of their online marketing efforts and independent solutions like TagMan are crucial to putting control of tagging back into the hands of client advertisers.”

TagMan is an independent tag management solution that enables agencies and advertisers to manage online marketing tags/pixels – and the data they provide – much more effectively. (Tags/pixels are pieces of code used by the entire digital advertising industry to track the performance of online campaigns). A single TagMan tag is installed on any advertiser’s page that needs tracking and all other tags/pixels that need to sit on that page – whether to track natural search, paid search, affiliates, display or site analytics – are housed and managed through the TagMan tag and browser-based interface.

The system allows tags/pixels to be added, edited or removed direct from a web page in minutes – a process that can ordinarily take months – and enables marketers to track the full customer journey a customer takes to a website. This allows them to plan future activity more effectively and eliminate duplicate commission payments where more than one channel claims the same sale. Since tags/pixels can be easily added and removed, TagMan allows agencies and advertisers to move between tag providers such as ad servers and affiliate networks as they see fit.

Other TagMan clients include advertisers Virgin Atlantic, Thomas Cook, and Alliance & Leicester and agencies Media Contacts, TBG London, Blue Barracuda and Didit.

TagMan (http://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 caused by the proliferation of website tracking tags and pixel weight. TagMan has revealed that up to 25% of a typical e-commerce advertiser’s commissions are duplicates.  TagMan 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 $9.50 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.

Founded in 2004, TagMan is privately owned and funded and has offices in New York and London.

NEW YORK (February 15, 2010)  TagMan, the one-tag/pixel solution to the problems of online campaign tracking, today announced it has closed a first-round of external financing led by Cambridge Angels and the London Business School E100.

Cambridge Angels investors include John Taysom, whose early stage internet investments include Advertising.com, Yahoo!, Forbes.com and infoseek and Andy Phillipps, formerly CEO and co-founder of Active Hotels. As part of the current funding round, TagMan adds to its Board of Directors: Robert Brady, founder of Brady plc, a software solutions business and a Cambridge Angel, and John Yeomans, director of First Capital and both a Cambridge Angel and London Business School E100 member.

The round also includes new investments from existing employee investors, including CEO and founder Paul Cook and co-founder and general manager Jonathan Baron. The company had previously raised a total of $800,000 angel funds from friends and employees.

TagMan is an independent tag management solution that enables agencies and advertisers to manage online marketing tags/pixels – and the data they provide – much more effectively. (Tags/pixels are pieces of code used by the entire digital advertising industry to track the performance of online campaigns). A single TagMan tag is installed on any advertiser’s page that needs tracking and all other tags/pixels that need to sit on that page – whether to track natural search, paid search, affiliates, display or site analytics – are housed and managed through the TagMan tag and browser-based interface.

The system allows tags/pixels to be added, edited or removed direct from a web page in minutes – a process that can ordinarily take months – and enables marketers to track the full customer journey a customer takes to a website. This allows them to plan future activity more effectively and eliminate duplicate commission payments where more than one channel claims the same sale. Since tags/pixels can be easily added and removed, TagMan allows agencies and advertisers to move between tag providers such as ad servers and affiliate networks as they see fit.

Tagman clients include online advertisers and agencies in the US and Europe, including Virgin Atlantic, Boden, Thomas Cook and Media Contacts.

“TagMan is growing quickly as we remove one of the most significant barriers to smarter online marketing – tag management and tracking,” says Mr. Baron. “This investment will be used to scale our business by continuing to grow our client support and product development teams and expand our already significant operations in the US market.”

“TagMan enables advertisers and their agencies to switch at will between any technology supplier, for example ad server, analytics provider and display network, which is key,” says John Taysom. “Without Tagman, marketers can’t plan their campaigns based on a true understanding of customer behavior, the channels that work, and how they perform together. Industry experts estimate that, there is 20%-30% waste in current budgets. Tagman levels the playing field enabling marketers to choose the technologies that best suit their business, rather than being tied into the large incumbent players that dominate online advertising following the consolidation that has occurred in the last few years. TagMan will help to drive innovation in the market.

“We were impressed how the powerful combination of pain-free tag management and a single view of the entire customer journey is already driving amazing returns for its clients. They can implement new campaigns immediately, plan their marketing spend more effectively and instantly save money by removing duplicate commission payments,” adds Mr. Taysom. “This new investment will enable this remarkable business to expand its operations to meet client demand and continue to drive the product and client support in the US and Europe.”

The Cambridge Angels are a group of high-net worth investors who have proven experience as successful entrepreneurs in technology and bio-technology. Members invest in and mentor high quality start-up and early-stage companies in these sectors. Members have been responsible for a large number of the “Cambridge Phenomenon” success stories over recent years. Therefore, in addition to providing funding for early-stage companies, the Cambridge Angels also offer start-ups the considerable benefit of a wide range of expertise, contacts and directly relevant experience in establishing and growing entrepreneurial businesses successfully.

The London Business School Enterprise 100 is an angel investor network comprised of high net worth individuals affiliated with the London Business School. Enterprise 100 has played an integral role in establishing the School as a centre of entrepreneurial excellence.

Launched in 1999, the club has evolved to become a fundamental part of the bridge between what’s happening in the classroom, the School’s successful entrepreneurs and the business community at large. Set up to extend the School’s association with the world’s leading entrepreneurs, and operating within the School’s Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the club already has over 90 members and always welcomes new applications.

TagMan (http://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 caused by the proliferation of website tracking tags and pixel weight. TagMan has revealed that up to 25% of a typical e-commerce advertiser’s commissions are duplicates.  TagMan 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 $9.50 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.

Founded in 2004, TagMan is privately owned and funded and has offices in New York and London.

Boden, the international online clothes retailer, has hired independent universal tag management system TagMan for tag management and to help the company understand the full journey its customers take on their way to buying from its websites.

The company, which employs 800+ staff and operates in the US, UK, Germany and Austria, will use TagMan to manage the tracking tags from search, display and affiliate campaigns on all its websites.

By plugging the third-party tracking tags from all its marketing channels into a single TagMan container tag on its pages, Boden will be able to follow the complete path to conversion that any of its customers take, including whether they come direct to the site or click or view on natural or paid search results, affiliate links or display campaigns.

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.

Oliver Elliott, online acquisition manager at Boden, said: “TagMan will give Boden’s marketing teams the power and flexibility to add and edit tracking tags as well as the rules governing their deployment. This can be carried out in minutes, whenever we or our partners require, without the need for scheduled updates to the website.

“Beyond tag management, TagMan will provide us with a rich source of touch-point data to better understand attribution and interaction across all online marketing channels. After a lengthy search, we’re confident that TagMan is the technology best placed to deliver this for Boden and are delighted to be one of the innovative businesses working with them.”

Jon Baron, general manager at TagMan, said: “Boden instantly and completely understood the potential benefits of using TagMan, especially where they have many sites to manage and campaigns from which to derive insight.”

About Boden

Boden is Britain’s best loved mail order clothing brand – selling womenswear, menswear, children’s and babywear through our catalogue, website and our two shops. We make well-made, colourful, flattering and fashionable clothes and accessories with a sense of fun and style at a fair price, delivered directly to your door.

Set up by Johnnie Boden in 1991, who was inspired by the high standards set by US mail order companies, Boden filled a gap in the UK market. Boden is now a £168 million turnover (2008) business employing approximately 800 staff.

The website was launched in 1999 (www.boden.co.uk) and is continually modernised: today 67% of UK sales and 75% of USA sales are taken over the internet. On average we’ll see around 330,000 visitors to the website every week in the UK and 190,000 in the US.

About TagMan

TagMan is a tag management system that solves the problems associated with site tagging and tracking of online marketing campaigns – including deduplication and marketing attribution – by acting as a single system and interface through which tags can be deployed to an advertiser’s web site.

Clients include advertisers Virgin Atlantic, Thomas Cook, and Alliance & Leicester and agencies Media Contacts, TBG London, Blue Barracuda and Didit.

It won the 2008 Econsultancy Innovation Award in the web analytics category where the judges said: “The creation of a single system and interface through which tags can be deployed is a significant innovation that can help remove the burden caused by the proliferation of tags as well as enabling complete campaign tracking.”

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

TagMan’s appointment by Boden was covered in this news story by New Media Age

Many companies have commented that through their use of an advanced web analytics company like AT Internet, Omniture or RedEye they already have analysis of every campaign a user clicks on in their path to conversion, and as a result they struggle to see how TagMan can help them beyond that.

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!

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

Just a heads up and a few words on our new ‘brand’. We’ve not changed much, just the tagline but that was difficult enough.

The challenge was to come up with something that summed up what TagMan is and does. The problem was that ‘what it is’ is known as many things: a universal tag, container tag, Floodlight tag, universal action tag, tag management system etc. etc.

Second, it does lots of things: campaign tracking, path to conversion analysis, attribution modelling, deduplication, tag management etc. etc.

Then there’s ‘actually’ what it allows you to do: be independent from technology providers, regain control of your data, save time and energy in the tagging process, save money on duplicate commission/CPA payments, plan your online advertising spend much more effectively (by seeing the whole user journey), and join up your site analytics and online advertising data.

So, given all these things, how could we come up with something that explained all that AND was punchy and memorable?

Well, by discussing it for ages. In the end, we plumped for a dual-action tagline, the first bit to explain what TagMan is and the second to explain what it does for you. So ‘Smart tags, smarter marketing’ was our answer. We wonder what yours might have been?

I am even more delighted to announce that TagMan has won the Innovation in Web Analytics and Optimization category of the inaugural e-consultancy Innovation Awards!

TagMan’s unique tag management solution that allows marketing and IT teams take control of tagging and also provides CPA de-duplication across all marketing channels has beaten off tough competition to win the awards.

Recognition of the innovative approach that TagMan has to digital marketing is always pleasing to receive, especially from well respected industry professionals.