Exactly who is TagMan, the company that nabbed $1.3 million in first round funding yesterday?

Well, the London-based company’s investors include John Taysom, whose early stage internet investments include Advertising.com, Yahoo!, Forbes.com and infoseek. On the ground, it 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.

Basically TagMan is trying to simplify tags, the code which agencies and advertisers use to track online ad campaigns. On a tech level, the company claims to give marketers more visibility to into conversations (and how to shift spending toward the most productive channels), reduces IT times and problems, lightens the page load on each tagged page.

We caught up with TagMan’s EVP Americas, Chris Brinkworth, to dig deeper into what the company does, and why it was worth the investment:

DigiDay: Interesting that your company would choose to focus on what seems to be a very defined ad technology. How do you explain your solution to marketers?

Brinkworth: Tags, pixels, tag weight effect on page loads and trying to reconcile often conflicting reports, are painful problems.  The industry knows it, we know it and that's what we set out to fix.  In fact, we solve all pain related to pixel load, management and the obvious disparity in reporting such as being able to answer: "What channels really helped to deliver that conversion? Google, Facebook, Behavioral, an ad, an e-mail – or all?" With Facebook also now launching a pixel, it’s about to get busier and reporting more complicated.

TagMan helps to manage, deploy and report on ‘any’ pixel/tag at any time, in minutes.  We show ‘true, or Real Time attribution’ of all of your digital marketing channels (including Natural Search) in one single unified report, with no need for IT coding or tag-by-tag removal.  By becoming ‘the final native container’ on a page that shows 'one user ID', many new insights and opportunities arise for marketing, media, analytics and ROI focused departments.   We reduce pixel and tag weight.  Beyond just ‘page weight’;  a ‘true view of attribution’ is something everyone needs to know.
 
The ‘future factor’ of what our collective client and provider experience has created over the years is a scalable, trusted and robust, vendor agnostic ‘universal container tag’ to solve the challenge of clients large and small. We never get bored of that ‘wow’ expressions when we give a live demonstration and report.

DigiDay: How does it work for retailers?

Brinkworth: We save you money on your marketing budget, operations and show you ‘what works’.  Online retailers and travel companies were simply the first to seek us out to solve their challenges or pixels and reporting. TagMan works best for ‘all’ companies, including those who have a pixel they want someone to test or try.

I think people also need to know we have a strong history with many happy clients and is visible in the public domain source-code of clients such as VirginAtlantic.com, SportingIndex.com and JohnLewis.com.  We have references and case-studies by sector from many satisfied advocates that we work with over the years.

We are working with Boden, the international online clothes retailer, to help the company understand the full journey its customers take on their way to buying from its websites. Boden is one of Britain’s best loved mail order clothing brands - selling women swear, menswear, children’s and babywear through a catalogue, website and two retail shops.  TagMan is doing much the same for Laura Ashley. Tagging is at the heart of how 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.”

Digiday: What can advertisers do tactically with the TagMan that they can't do now?
Brinkworth: Marketers can now see the 100% true path to conversion of all digital marketing channels, including where natural search fits and also de-duplicate tags dynamically if needed. They can tie all of their separate agency or partner channel reports together seamlessly and easily. Did that coupon code add incremental value – or just decrease your basket value? Did that PPC campaign drive a natural search sale 2 weeks later?

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.

Advertisers and agencies can effortlessly test all of the tools, placements and opportunities that they could not do before; and see every step their customers took to conversion; and pass back any information to any of their partner tags/pixels if they want to.