General

Q: What are ad tags and tracking tags for, within online marketing?

Q: What actually are 'tags'?

Q: What are the challenges in managing ad tags?

Q: What is the significance of TagMan's Universal Tag?

Q: What are ad tags and tracking tags for, within online marketing?

A: In all 'digital advertising', each time a viewer goes to a page on a publisher website (or clicks on a display on the page), one or more requests will come from the publisher website to an advertiser/merchant's website, possibly via an advertising network or affiliate or paid search link.

The publisher's website contains code to call up an ad; and the advertiser's website contains code to receive the requests. Both are termed ad tags (Tagman is primarily concerned with tag management on advertiser sites).

The requests may be to deliver an ad, to select an ad from a 'cassette' of ads based on certain selection criteria (depending eg on the targeting basis), or to initiate further marketing activity eg via PPC or PPA. The choice will also depend on supply side issues - such as how long an ad campaign is to run, or which kind of people are the specified targets - as well as on information received from the publisher website or from information relating to a viewer's cookie.

Ad tags are the code on an advertiser's website that manage an inbound request for a particular type of ad to a particular publisher's website or webpage. They receive the request from a publisher website; initiate any process required to select the 'right' material to respond with; and record statistics such as how many times a given ad has been sent out, which may be used for managing charging.

Tracking tags perform the equivalent function for web marketing on the advertisers website.

TagMan helps tie up all the data together and manage things more efficiently.

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Q: What actually are 'tags'?

A: Tracking Tags (in general) are typically a few lines long. Coding is variously in ASP, HTML or Javascript, although most current tags used in internet advertising and marketing are coded in Javascript. This is what Tagman uses. Please see the 'Technical Questions' for more details.

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Q: What are the challenges in managing ad tags?

A: A lot of this is covered in the 60 second pitch video on our homepage. Key points: Managing all the different incoming data from tags from all the different publishers; recording accurate statistics on hits/page delivery etc; de-duping to ensure a web marketer doesn't get charged twice when a single lead comes in from more than one source; and providing accurate unified data output for visualization and analytics tools.

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Q: What is the significance of TagMan's Universal Tag?

A: There are many, many, ad networks and data companies each vying to increase its dominance. Some provide their own ad server solutions (ie servers which deliver ads on behalf of customers) and sometimes the ad servers are independent of ad networks. Many ad servers, DSP's, Exchanges and ReTargeting companies - would like to control their advertiser accounts more, and see one way of doing that as becoming the supplier of a single unified tag solution into an account. However, at this stage of development of the industry, many advertisers do not want to be restricted to dealing with one ad network, or to trust their ad and campaign management activity to a single ad server, publisher or system related to an Marketing Services Agency. This has many privacy implications also on data ownership and use.

At the same time, there is an increasing number of suppliers of analytics - software and visualization packages to measure the effectiveness of eg ad campaigns - and the scope of the products is increasing. These analytics suppliers need reliable sources of raw data, and suffer a high level of complexity if they have to interface to multiple suppliers.

Tagman is an independent supplier of tag management solutions, positioned between the tag management solutions of ad servers and the analytics companies. As well as its independence, a key benefit is its low cost.

TagMan is a complete, agnostic Universal Tag solution that industry can use to keep up with the new data-driven world.

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