NEW YORK, NY – TagMan, the one-tag/pixel solution to the problems of online campaign tracking, 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 (http://cambridgeangels.angelgroups.net/) 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.
