• 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• High probability of duplicate and outdated tags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.

1. Can the system manage all the tags you may want to deploy today?
Turns out there are a boatload of tags out there and at least 100 of them are used regularly by leading emarketers.   Think of it this way, if your tag management system doesn’t support all the tags you plan on tracking, there will be some gaping holes in your reports, greatly diminishing the value of the overall system.  Also, you don’t want to find out three months into it that you need a new system to manage more complex tags required for A/B testing, live chat, segmentation analysis, attribution and social widgets.

2. Is the vendor agnostic and independent?
Given the growing interest in tag management, a number of digital service providers including agencies, web analytics and ad servers have slapped on a simple container to their systems, hoping to help their clients manage tags. As convenient as this solution might seem, it’s a bit like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.  Each of these service providers has a vested interest in the results as well as an overwhelming desire to lock the client into their particular system.  A tag agnostic system that is independent of all the tag providers not only insures optimal data integrity but also makes it easier for clients to consider swapping ad servers and/or analytics providers.

3. Does the vendor have experience in your category?
In a category that is only four years old, there is a temptation to accept inexperience under the assumption that experience isn’t out there or that your particular situation is unique.  The reality is that tag management systems have now been deployed on over 100 leading global ecommerce sites.  These companies can tell you first hand that experience matters, that every category has its unique characteristics and there are a number of critical steps to achieving optimal results.  The right vendor will also understand and provide the service and support needed for a successful and timely launch.

4. Does the vendor have a vision for the future?
Tags aren’t going away in the foreseeable future but how they are managed and deployed will undoubtedly change a lot even in the next 12-24 months.  Without insights and a clear vision, the system you invest in today could be obsolete before you’ve even completed your implementation.  The challenge therefore is to find a system that has a strong foundational platform, one that anticipates and supports your future needs. And with rising concerns about privacy, it is essential that you work with a vendor that is not just fully compliant with the latest privacy standards across the globe but also can anticipate where privacy regulations are heading.

More and more, our industry is moving towards a data-driven media ecosystem with technical and regulatory challenges. As a result, there will continue to be more and more pixels, tags and widgets that you need to trial, and more digital touch points that you need to combine and track in one report. Investing time in researching tag management systems now will save you a lot of pain and money in the future.

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.

TagMan Study Finds That Problems With Ad Pixel/Tag Implementation and Management Plague Nearly All Sites Causing Loss of Traffic and Sales.

Other Negative Consequences Include: Loss of Campaign Performance Data; Delays in Launch of New Campaigns; Delays in Use of a New Marketing Technology.

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – September 20, 2010) – TagMan, the marketing tag management system that solves the problems associated with site tagging and tracking of online marketing campaigns through a single universal tag, today released the results of a survey of client and agency advertising executives around the globe that shows that almost all (99%) faced problems with ad pixel/tag implementation and management that are costing websites traffic and sales. Nearly 9 in ten (86%) of respondents have had tags implemented incorrectly on the sites they manage and three quarters (75%) had seen delays in the implementation of tags due to website development cycles. The implications of tag management issues among respondents included loss of campaign performance data (65%), delays in launch of a new campaign (63%), delays in use of a new marketing technology (58%), loss of website traffic (31%), loss of website sales (28%). Only 1% said they never faced tag management issues.

Almost a quarter (23%) of client and agency respondents spend more than $10 million per year on marketing technologies and services that rely on site tags but over a quarter did not know how much they spent on IT resource to implement tags.

“Unless you are in the IT department, there is a tendency to gloss over the problems of ad tag implementation and management, taking for granted that somehow ad tags are easily added or taken away without cost or consequence, but as our study shows, there are huge costs and potentially significant loss of revenue from poorly managed ad tags,” says Paul Cook, CEO of TagMan.

Nearly a third (30%) of respondents said it took a week to implement a new tag on the websites they managed. Nearly a quarter (24%) said the person responsible for tag implementation spent 1 to 2 days per month on the task. In more than half of cases (52%), tagging sits outside the control of marketers.

Other findings:

• More than a third (37%) of client advertiser and agency respondents have implemented more than 20 tags on the websites they manage in the last year
• Almost half (46%) of client and agency respondents said internal IT at the client advertiser was most responsible for the implementation of tags
• Universal tags reduce tag implementation times to a month for those that ordinarily take 1-3 months and to 1-3 months for those previously taking 3-6 months
• Direct IT costs for tag implementation are more than halved where universal tags are used

The survey was completed by more than 100 online advertising executives in a variety of roles, businesses and territories during July 2010.

View the main findings and request the full report

TagMan (www.TagMan.com) is the single-tag Tag Management System solution to the problems of online campaign tracking and slow pages loads due to excess tags. By acting as a single, universal tag management system 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, Ted Baker and Air New Zealand. TagMan was founded in November 2007 and has offices in New York and London.

1. Universal Tag? – Is that a Tag Management System?
2. Containter Tag solutions? – Are they a Tag Management System

UNIVERSAL TAG:

• Tag Management Systems should include, but are not a standalone  “Universal Tag or Universal Pixel” component
• A Universal Tag is generally considered as a “simplified platform for tagging “  It assists technology focused analytics experts in passing generic data so it can be mapped to a vendor-specific syntax at any time.
• A Universal Tag and other such deployment tools are generally attached to a web analytics vendor who can offer extraneous services as the product was born from their need to service clients.
• A Universal Tag, generally cannot deploy nor manage a complete Tag Management System, but a Tag Management System can contain and also deploy a Universal Tag – therefore ensuring freedom to switch when needed.

Question: Does your Universal Tag or “Tag Deployment Tool” have a corporate ownership/relationship spawned from a consulting company?

• EG: Is your deployment tool agnostic?
• EG: Do your existing analytics team and Analytics consulting agency feel comfortable with that ownership?
• EG: Will that agency ensure some tags work better than others?

CONTAINER TAG

• Tag Management Systems should include, as part of their complete service -  but are not a stand alone “Container Tag”  component
• A Container Tag solution is a simple piece of code that holds lots of tags and pixels on a page. You deploy and piggyback simple pixels and tags within a commonly ( i-frame container solution) .
• Container solutions allow you to ‘stuff tags’ into one solution; to assist slightly with containing certain tags or pixels without the site losing control.
• Container solutions are generally tied to an existing service such as an agency, ad-serving contract, data collection provider, DSP, exchange or other.   You only get the container ‘if’ you buy into their main offering.
• If you want to quickly change vendor (ad-server, media agency, DSP, Retargeting company etc) – you are a generally out of luck if they are also your main container solution hard-coded across your entire portfolio.
• You have no simple ease of visibility into the pixels/tags being stuffed into each container
• You have no real control over data ownership

-       A Container Tag, cannot deploy nor manage a Tag Management System.

Container solutions (eg, Floodlight, ZAP, UAT) can easily be deployed through a basic Tag Management System.  IE – Agencies and clients have no problem migrating Container Solutions into Tag Management Systems.

QUESTION:  Does the container tag solution you use leave you tied to a vendor you would not like to be tied to down the line? EG – are they agnostic?

• EG:  If a data/re-targeting focused vendor, is your container solution, or if one of your competitors invests in that business – is it the wolf, guarding the sheep?  Do they have yours and your consumers best interests and more importantly ownership and privacy concerns in mind?
• EG: If you want to leave them, what happens to all the data that they have collected for you the past year or so? Is it yours still?

TAG MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS To that end:  Container solutions and Universal Tags cannot deploy nor manage a Tag Management System – but, a Tag Management System (if the TMS is robust enough)  can easily allow you to swap out any and all container tags, universal tags or data management platform tags – without concern or being reliant / held hostage to a vendor. Our next post will focus on the deeper aspects of a Tag Management System and what you should look for in regards to the functionality. BTW – did you realize yet that TagMan stands “Tag Management” It’s not a cartoon super hero in a cape here to save your day; though we are very happy to do so!  Contact us for a demo, we’ve been doing this since 2007  and happy to show you all of our client success stories.

“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.

The proliferation of tags

Pretty much every digital initiative a marketer undertakes involves some form of tracking to facilitate or optimise.  All ‘drive-to-web’ marketing clearly has the requirement of having campaign conversion tags or pixels sitting on the confirmation pages to track the success of the campaign, while multivariate testing and retargeting initiatives need to anonymously identify the user so they know what copy/content or creative to show.

With lots of different suppliers across different countries all requiring some form of tag on the client’s site, it isn’t surprising that so much vocabulary has been created.  I’ll try to break this down into two sections: the tag itself and the different forms it can take (including what it actually does) and then whereabouts on the page it goes.

The ‘tag’

A tag is simply a piece of code which will sit on your website. When the page is viewed by the user, the code springs to live and calls something to be retrieved from a server then the ‘tag’ will have done it’s magic.  They are often called pixels (although this is a type of tag); cookies (although this is what the tag will set on the users browser); beacons (although this is not really a tag which will sit on the page itself); universal tag (again a specific type of tag); or a container tag (like the Atlas Universal Action Tag or DoubleClick Floodlight tag).

What tags do

So, then what does this piece of code actually call?  Typically, it will do one of two things: call a 1×1 image pixel (a transparent GIF) or a JavaScript library to do something more interesting.  A 1×1 image pixel offers the most basic of telling a technology what is going on. When the page is viewed by the user, the call of the pixel can collect some parameters from the page (such as a page ID, basket value or order ID), and, when requesting the GIF from the tracking server, set a cookie on the user’s browser with an encrypted and unique identifier, and pass back to the tracking server the unique identifier (so it knows who this refers to) and any parameters or page IDs (so it knows what has gone on).

Meanwhile, cookies are simply short text files (viewed in Notepad) of encrypted information which can be read only by the technology that put them there. They don’t have any software or intelligence and cannot do anything except be recognised and be written to.  Some companies – perhaps more underhand – don’t use cookies for the fear of users deleting them, and instead they use a flash object. It works exactly the same way as a cookie, but is stored in a different place and is much, much harder to delete.

The other call a tag will make is to call a JavaScript library.  Now JavaScript is a wonderful thing in that you can write the code to do anything and therefore do anything on a page – this is perhaps one of the reasons why our esteemed IT colleagues don’t really like the idea of marketing people having this much power. However, I think that argument rather shoots itself in the foot in that an established supplier wouldn’t risk sullying their reputation by doing something which isn’t in the best interests of their client’s website.

TagMan will use a JavaScript call in a tag where we can because we (or the marketers using TagMan via the user interface) can update what the tag does without having to change the code on the website – and we all know changing code natively on a webpage can lead to huge delays.

The second issue of why IT may not be as keen on JavaScript is because a user might have disabled JavaScript to run.  Now I’m sure there is research out there with recorded stats on this, but as a straw poll, next time you are out and about with friends (not people in the industry) ask them if they know about how to turn off JavaScript.

Right, to recap. We’ve covered what the tag will call on the page, and what they’ll do on the browser. Next is where they go on the page.

Where they go

The issue of location comes down to the need for the tag to serve as early as possible in the page loading, while not getting in the way of the user experience.  Most of the time, the tag will go at the bottom of the page above the footer and still in the body of the page, although some technologies require the tag to be further up the page near the header.  If you’re confident the technology supplier of this tag will have excellent performance on their tracking servers serving the tag, you need not worry – i.e. do they serve the tags from servers in your country? Do they use a single server, or a cloud computing network? Are they sitting within a CND? If the performance is likely to be better than your own web servers, then it matters less where the tag is.  If you fear the performance might be limited, either find another supplier, or place the tag at the bottom of the page so it will be loaded once the page itself has loaded and not hinder page load times.

Tags can also be loaded within their own iFrame, essentially a parallel section which can be served simultaneously with the content of the page.  iFrames are the default technology for most container tags, including DoubleClick Floodlight and Atlas UAT, as they enable more flexibility of what the third-party tags served within the container tag can actually do (location on the page, parameters passed etc). However, they can be heavy to load. (Find out more about the impact of tags, including iFrame containers, on data accuracy and page load times in our Tag Latency Study ).

While I could go on and on about the intricacies of tags and what they do (and my family could vouch for that!), I’ll leave it there for now.  In the next blog/report, I’ll really confuse you and introduce the idea of server tags which need not go on the page at all…

The website overviews the TagMan page tag management solution and the company as a whole as well as links to company media and interesting industry reading……….Enjoy and feel free to drop us a line or a note on the contact us page to chat in more detail.

We think tag management is becoming a real issue and that the piggy-back solutions only address part of the problem. Would love to hear their thoughts about TagMan, sounds like it could be the solution!