• by Andrew Sullivan , July 15, 2010

Air New Zealand began working with TagMan in June to implement and manage campaign tracking tags across its European Web sites. The single-page tag container embedded in Web site pages houses all tags used to track the airline's online campaign, including display, paid and natural search, affiliates and site analytics. Why should you care about all this unless you are planning a trip to South Island (and even then, why should you)? Well, you care about Google ranking, don't you? You care about user's abandoning slow-loading pages, don't you?

Every tracking pixel on a page slows its load time. A TagMan study found that tracking pixels were in fact the slowest loading assets on many pages - taking as long as 250ms to load. Also based on this research, TagMan found that a delay of 1 second can cause 10 percent of users to abandon a page. Which translates to a 10 percent audience loss for four pixels.

Whether you are a retailer or an online publisher, this audience bleed is not good for business. And as you probably well know, Google recently added page load times to its tracking algorithms. The single-page tracking tag obviates the need to have multiple pixels.

The technology lets Air New Zealand manage tags embedded in Web pages, reduces human error, automates processes, provides a full view of campaigns, and helps to manage conversions so that commissions are not paid twice on the same sale.

Air New Zealand can now track the entire path that consumers take to make purchases from its European sites, which include travel and security policies, destination pages, club membership pages, airport information, and more.

The TagMan system lets Air New Zealand identify each marketing piece consumers interact with, from the beginning through the conversion funnel. Since the airline relies on affiliate channels to drive traffic to its Web site, it also needs a method to track all the consumers who come from these additional Web partners.

Other airlines have had success. Virgin Atlantic also works with TagMan. For every dollar spent for services through TagMan, Virgin Atlantic saved $41 by reducing the duplication between channels that might claim commission from the same sale, TagMan estimates.

The last click just prior to a sale might have come from multiple channels, such as an affiliate network, display advertising or email campaign. Thus, unless they can track every click, companies may end up paying two people commission for the same sale.

Most marketers thought they spent between 12 percent and 13 percent more than they should on commissions, but a study by TagMan reveals they actually spent 25 percent to 35 percent too much.