Tealium is proud to announce the launch of Tealium iQ, a new self-service solution that enables marketers to manage and deploy their digital marketing solutions without having to burden IT resources.

Tealium iQ’s new point-and-click user interface allows marketers to easily add, remove or modify the various web page tags associated with the vast majority of today’s digital marketing vendors. This means digital marketers can launch online campaigns faster, measure better, and easily swap out and test different marketing vendors before making a buying decision.

“The goal of tag management is to give marketing and measurement professionals direct control over their digital measurement infrastructure, and to eliminate the need for costly and time-consuming IT cycles,” said Gary Angel, president and CTO of Semphonic, the leading web analytics and measurement consulting group. “Tealium iQ does a superb job of that.”

Web page tags are used for everything from data collection and measurement to behavioral targeting and online optimization. Tealium estimates that up to 90 percent of today’s digital marketing vendors – web analytics companies, retargeting vendors, email service providers, affiliate marketers, etc. – use some type of JavaScript-based tag that needs to be implemented on a client’s web site.

How Tealium iQ Works

With the proliferation in the number of web site tags that must be managed today, Tealium iQ provides a single ‘universal’ tag that enables companies to manage and deploy all their different digital marketing solutions from one web console.

Until now, most tag management solutions still require IT involvement and JavaScript knowledge, but Tealium iQ is the first solution to allow marketers to manage 100 percent of the tagging themselves thanks to a new intuitive interface and instant integration with all major digital marketing vendors, from Facebook to Google Analytics.

Users simply click on a vendor, set some quick rules, and hit publish to implement their tags automatically. They can do everything from adding a Google AdWords conversion code to their confirmation page, to immediately launching a banner retargeting campaign – all with point and click simplicity.

“Tealium has greatly improved our online marketing efficiency, while also freeing IT resources,” said Houman Akhavan, vice president of marketing for US Auto Parts, which has more than 550,000 car parts in its online inventory. “We can execute our campaigns and digital initiatives a lot faster, which translates into better results.”

Tag management has grown tremendously in recent years due to the proliferation of tags, according to analysts. Angel calls tag management one of the “most important new technologies in digital marketing today.” The average Tealium client carries between 20-30 vendor tags on their web pages.

With the launch of Tealium iQ, Tealium has combined the best tag management technology with the easiest, and most intuitive interface in the industry. Contact us for a live demo of Tealium iQ.

One of the  conversations that digital marketing teams engage in today’s environment is whether  they need a tag management system or not. As companies are increasing their use of digital marketing technologies, their need for a tag management solution increases. Up to now, most companies seeking a tag management system typically shared one of two characteristics:

• They deployed lots of different tags (i.e. analytics, ads, affiliates, etc.)
• They had a constant need to change tags (i.e. new marketing programs, trial of new vendors, etc.)

There are of course other factors that can prompt organizations to invest in tag management systems. For a thorough list, we recommend that you check out the Forrester research titled “How Tag Management Improves Web Intelligence” by Joe Stanhope.

Up to now the group least likely to require a tag management system included the two following characteristics:

• They don’t use lots of tags
• The have no plans to change their vendors

Sounds logical right? Think again.

Just recently, Google introduced a new feature in Google Analytics which provides valuable reports around page load performance, called Site Speed Reports. The new feature helps companies determine  the impact of site performance on their web site conversion.

In order to take advantage of this features, customers will have to update their tracking code in the following manner:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
(function() { var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true; ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script>

The change of tracking code is not unique to Google Analytics. Just recently, Yahoo! announced that the Yahoo! Web Analytics tracking code V4 will no longer be supported.

In both cases, tag management systems let customers update their tracking code without changing their pages. For Tealium customers, this is just a matter of changing their templates from within the Tag Management Console.

We’re no longer seeing tag management as a technology deployed by customers that want to constantly add or change their vendors, but also by organizations that want to make sure that they’re deploying the latest version of their vendor tags. To find out more about how Tealium can help you leverage the latest features from your digital marketing vendors, contact us.

Tealium is pleased to announce Conversion as the first certified partner in Warsaw, Poland. The Conversion customer base can now leverage Conversion’s expertise in Universal Tagging across multiple solutions.

Today’s growing landscape of online marketing and web analytics is putting an increasing burden on web development teams within organizations to deploy multiple tags in a timely fashion. The addition of tags not only increases the total cost of maintaining sites, but also has an adverse effect on site performance. Tealium allows companies to deploy one tag that effectively communicates with all web analytics and digital marketing solutions. It is the most widely used Universal Tag technology for the enterprise.

“We are proud to be the first organization in Poland to earn the Tealium Universal Tag Certification,” said Pawel Ogonowski, Chief Conversion Optimizer at Conversion. “The certification further solidifies our leadership in web analytics and conversion optimization by emphasizing the superior deployments made possible through Tealium.”

“We are very excited to have Conversion as a certified partner,” said Ali Behnam, Tealium co-founder. “Conversion will be able to streamline client implementations of digital marketing tags while improving site performance.”

We’re delighted to add Jeff Lunsford to our advisory board.

Mr. Lunsford is currently the Chairman and CEO of Limelight Networks. Prior to that, he was the CEO of WebSideStory, a leading provider of web analytics solutions, which was acquired by Omniture. He led both Limelight Networks and WebSideStory through rapid growth phases and their initial public offerings. It was at WebSideStory that Tealium co-founders worked with Mr. Lunsford.

The addition is a key component for Tealium’s growth strategy and comes on the heels of staff additions in areas of both sales and support.

We welcome Mr. Lunsford and other new team members to Tealium and look forward to rapid growth in 2011 and beyond, including major product upgrades to be announced soon.

We are happy to announce the general availability of the SiteCatalyst Toolbox for users of Tealium Tag Management Console. So what does it do?

With Tealium, customers can simplify and streamline their page tagging by deploying just one tag on their site. Users can then log in to Tag Management Console and use the SiteCatalyst Toolbox to manage their complex SiteCatalyst implementations.

Some of the capabilities of this toolbox include:

• Variable mapping: allows users to configure how data can be passed to the various props, eVars and events. For example, users will be able to trigger certain events based on desired criteria such as failed searches or purchase types.
• Merchandising evars: allows users to get detailed reporting on merchandising attributes, such as popularity of products by size, color, brand and other attributes.
• Incrementor Event support: also known as numeric or currency support. For example, users will be able to easily measure the value associated with gift certificate redemption using such implementation.

The SiteCatalyst Toolbox is available effective immediately for all users of Tag Management Console.

Next Step:

• Learn more about Tag Management Console
• Request a demo of Tag Management Console

Today, we launched the newly designed Tealium web site. The website has long been overdue for a facelift. But more importantly, we felt that we needed to better show our emphasis on tag management.

Additionally, you’ll notice the removal of products that are no longer being marketed, such as the social media product.

Tealium’s mission is to provide customers with the best tag management platform. We invite you find out more about this exciting technology and get a live demo of our offering.

Congratulations to Antoine Janning and the team at MediaPod for winning the New Services Award at E-Commerce Paris 2010, the largest exhibition of e-commerce technologies in Europe.

MediaPod was awarded Best of Show award for their use of Tealium Universal Tag on client web sites, saving clients several months of IT resources for deployment of tags.

MediaPod is a Tealium Certified Partner. We at Tealium would like to congratulate MediaPod for their continuous innovation in the fields of web analytics deployments and tag management.

Tag Management or Universal Tag?

If you attended X Change, one of the huddles offered was around universal tagging. There are a growing number of companies taking different approaches to the same problem: web site tagging is a mess – whether it’s for web analytics, ad, affiliate tags or a combination. The industry as a whole is starting to tackle the issue – something that we started addressing over two years ago – and that’s a good thing.

Some are using the term “universal tag” while others call it “tag management”. The term embraced by the industry in the long run is anybody’s guess. Our feeling is that it’s pretentious for any one person or organization at this point to decide what the term is. The industry is still very new. In the long run, the clients will decide what the best nomenclature is.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember all the different terms that people used to describe the “Web Analytics” industry:
Web Metrics, Site Statistics, Web Stats, Site Analysis, Web Traffic Analysis, Web Intelligence, eBusiness Intelligence, Online Metrics, eMetrics – and I’m sure I missed a few. Eventually the industry started standardizing around the term “Web Analytics”.

Remember ASP? No, not “average selling price” or “active server pages”. It was the term referred by almost all SAAS (Software as a service) providers in the 2000-2003 era. It stood for “Application Service Provider”. Now everyone’s using SAAS. The business models are the same. Only the names are different.

We’re now going through same nomenclature education/battle within the “universal tag” industry. You’ve probably heard the various terms: Universal Tag, Tag Management, Tag Management System, Container Tag, and two other terms that I’d personally like to throw into the mix: “Master Tag” and “Tagging As A Service” (TAAS) – you’ve heard them here first.

So what’s the point of all this?

The point is that it doesn’t matter. This is what marketing people do in order to educate the market. Unfortunately, most of the time they end up confusing the market more than educate it.

So what’s our position on this? Well it depends partly on the methodology used by the provider to tackle the issue. But there are some key features that companies should take into consideration when looking at a universal tag/tag management solution:

Hosted vs. On-demand

Our belief is that a true “universal” tag should provide customers with either option. Some customers prefer the entire solution to be hosted by the vendor – it’s easy, clean and void of headaches. Others (especially clients with large traffic) insist on hosting their own solution. For such clients, any third-party server point of failure is an important determining factor.

Dashboard vs. Programmatic Editing

As of today, there are two ways to change tagging rules within a deployment. One choice is to use a dashboard or a user interface to make such changes. For Tealium, this is the Tag Management Console, which lets business users modify their tag deployment by adding/removing vendors, setting load conditions, data inputs (meta tags, breadcrumbs, javascript variables, etc.), variable mappings, commission rules, etc.

On the other hand, some customers, specifically those that are more technical in nature want to go beyond what can be made available in a user interface. They want to get under the hood and understand the solution at its core and not treat it as some black box magical tag manager. Our belief is that the solution should provide both options to the user.

Lease vs. Perpetual Model

With the lease model, the solution is a SAAS, or as I’d like to call it TAAS. Many of the tag management solutions fall into this category. However, many customers may prefer to own the license outright and not pay based on the number of server calls, especially since one of the value propositions of universal tags is to reduce any reliance on one vendor. Again, the solution needs to provide the necessary level of flexibility in this regard.

Rich vs. One-line Tags

A one-line tag means a simple include line pointing to a JS file which then makes one or many calls to a server yielding the actual “tag” implementation either statically defined or via server configuration. A one-line tag provides the simplest deployment to the client, but comes at a cost. The server dependency can cause reduced customer experience and a single point of failure. The concept of a rich-tag is more of a “master tag” allowing the client development team to expose data relevant to the application.  A rich tag has more initial upfront work but is ultimately more flexible and from a performance standpoint, optimal. We usually see clients that have over 5 data points (variables) opt for rich tags and others with less demanding needs opt for one-line includes. If your site already has meaningful meta data tags, microformats, or consistent elements in the page like breadcrumbs, you may already have a rich tagged site. Our belief is that a “universal tag” supports both tagging options.

Our Take

For Tealium, a universal tag is about choice. Henry Ford once said “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”. Although the philosophy works for industrial assembly lines, a “one-size fits all” strategy is the wrong approach for enterprise-level web sites with distinct environments.

This is the Tealium philosophy – a solution that can adapt to client needs and environment. This is why we feel that “tag management” as it stands today only provides a subset functionality of an enterprise-level “universal tag”, and why we have chosen to build universal tag products and to provide universal tag services.

Tag Management has arrived. While attending this year’s Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP) Summit, one of the topics of discussion among attendees was universal tagging and tag management. This of course is great news as it validates our vision dating back to 2008, as we first introduced universal tagging for web analytics.

What was once a vision and a consulting project here at Tealium is now a topic of discussion at web analytics conferences, including the upcoming X Change. And as marketers’ knowledge of universal tagging increases, so does the product’s maturity. A key requirement has been the ability for business users to manage their tags without IT involvement.

Enter Tag Management Console.

The Tag Management Console is the admin console for Universal Tag Deployments. Within the Console, non-technical users can manage their tag using a drag-and-drop interface.

Want to add DoubleClick tags to your site? Simply drag the DoubleClick icon and enter your account ID.

Want to add Google Analytics? Drag the Google Analytics icon and enter your account ID.

Want to add Eloqua tags for better lead nurturing? Well, you get the idea.

Once configured, users can add, edit and delete their marketing tags and manage complex implementations such as changing mappings from one vendor variable to another. Again, all this is done without straining valuable IT resources, meaning that you can make changes to your tags in hours or days instead of weeks and months.

Best of all, the Tag Management Console is now available to all Tealium Universal Tag customers and Certified Partners.

Contact us to schedule a live demo of Tag Management Console.

In our previous posts, we talked about how the Universal Tag can simplify your web analytics implementation and improve the web analytics process. In this post, we’re going to discuss another key benefits associated with the Universal Tag:

Universal Tag is about preparing for the unknown.

Let’s face it. Implementations change because requirements change. Traditional web analytics deployments require you to know your requirements well in advance before you start tagging. Your reporting requirements (how you want to see the data) will dictate how you tag your analytics solution.

Want to see the impact of site search on cart activity? You’ll have to tag for it.
Want to see the number of times people view a product before placing it in cart? You’ll have to tag for it.
Want to see the effect of white paper downloads on lead conversions? You’ll have to tag for it.

This is costly. And what makes the process more cumbersome is the fact that requirements change. The change can be part of the evolutionary process associated with web analytics, or simply because of unexpected consequences of your implementation. In this post, we’re going to discuss what happened to a major consumer products company and how the Universal Tag saved them from re-tagging.

In this specific scenario, the company just launched a virtual world promoting many of their different brands. The virtual world is built completely in Flash and in order to track the effectiveness of the on-site promotional offers, the company decided to track the promotions as on-site campaign impressions. In other words, as a new offer (internal ad) appears on the screen, an impression tracking is sent to the web analytics tool.

This measurement framework allows the company to measure the click-through rate of the internal offers (since impressions are being tracked). However, it also results in an unexpected side effect.

Assuming that upon each offer, an impression request is sent to the analytics tool, what happens if the visitor leaves his/her computer while keeping the browser open (say heads out to lunch)?

This implementation will result in many extra unwanted calls being sent to the vendor, which results in both artificially high number of server calls (cost to the customer), as well as engagement metrics in the form of time spent on site.

With a traditional web analytics deployment, the client will have to go back to the web development team and to add a logic within the content management system that caps the number of ad impressions being sent. However, with a Universal Tag deployment, fixing this is simply a matter of adding a new plug-in to the Universal Tag library. The plug-in automatically cuts off requests after a defined number of impressions. The web development team or the agency does not have to change a thing and web analytics practitioners can be in total control of how the data is sent to the vendor.

Web analytics implementations are not always easy. Often times, as you’re getting into advanced implementations, there’s a chance that you’ll see unexpected behaviors or side effects from the implementation. With traditional deployments, these require a re-tagging exercise. The Universal Tag on the other hand lets you deploy once and fine tune without having to re-touch your page tags every time, hence preparing for the unknown.