Nick Stringer

The summit kicked off with Nick Stringer’s presentation, “Preparing for the revised ePrivacy directive.” Nick, who serves as the IAB’s Director of Regulatory Affairs, gave a concise glimpse of the EU Privacy Directive, why it’s being enforced, and what businesses need to do to be compliant. Nick advised that in order for the UK to continue as the most advanced internet economy in the world, customer data must be used responsibly and transparently to empower the consumer. Businesses should know what’s going on, be clear and transparent, deliver prominence, and know that “context is king!”

Damian Scragg

Evidon knows all about empowering the customer. Just ask Damian Scragg, managing director at Evidon (our new partner). Evidon has done the impossible – making privacy “sexy” by empowering consumers and businesses to see, understand and control data online. In light of the upcoming EU Directive, Damian advises businesses to audit and continually monitor tracking across sites, review privacy policies and consider a cookie policy, and deploy consent solutions.

Bill Beckler

The summit wrapped up with Bill Beckler, Manager of Marketing Analytics at lastminute.com, who had an interesting take on the EU Directive: The new Privacy Directive isn’t at all a negative! It’s actually a great opportunity for website owners/ecommerce executives to provide clarity and information around what’s happening behind the scenes of web pages (i.e. tracking, cookies, etc.)

It was clear from the presentations that Tag Management can play a huge role in how website owners handle ePrivacy and companies will need to get smart on how they manage their cookies and tags if they’re going to comply with new privacy directives.  In light of all this, what makes TagMan a great tool is that it makes compliance with privacy laws and directives seamless. It was great to hear from a TagMan client that unlike the archaeological dig it may be without Tag Management, TagMan makes auditing easy and clear to understand.

Check out the presentations by clicking here.

At the heart of this privacy issue, are a website’s tags, cookies, and data collection and how etailers will manage consumers opting out of online tracking by putting “do-not-track” capabilities in place. Fortunately, tag management systems enable advertisers to control all data-driven vendors in one place, thereby ensuring that best practices are met across the board. When it comes to TagMan, our system has do-not track built in from the start, enabling marketers to comply with the opt-out promises that the various laws and regulations require, and still continue to use tracking systems that don’t require such opt-outs. Here Virgin Atlantic talks about how they use tag management to manage their ePrivacy compliance.

Allison Wightman

“Like most etailers, we were concerned about the upcoming consumer privacy demands and how these changes would impact the many third-party behavioural targeting tags we have on our site, while still enabling us to use other analytical tools to track traffic, campaigns and other ROI measurements.” said Allison Wightman, Head of eBusiness, Virgin Atlantic.

That’s when the airline called on TagMan to help them get ePrivacy compliant.

“TagMan has truly proved invaluable in helping us get ready for the new EU-Privacy Directive. Because all of our third party tags are housed in their independent tag management system, by using the system we were able to quickly and easily extract information to give us full visibility into all tags on our site. Having this information upfront was key to our cookie auditing process.” Wightman added.

Virgin used TagMan’s Tag Management system to get ePrivacy compliant with these 4 steps:

• Receiving full visibility of all the tags they have firing through TagMan. Not all vendors have the visibility into which tags are on a site or where they are located. Virgin’s audit demonstrated just how complex the process can be with 39 tags across 108 locations. Having full visibility also enabled them to identify which tags were no longer live and then allowed them to remove them easily.
• Ensuring all tags on Virgin honored all web browser’s “do-not-track” features. In this case, our system can determine when a user’s browser is set to not allow third-party cookies to be tracked. We ensure that tags are not served to the user.
• Providing clarity on the TagMan cookie as one of their vendors.
• Detailing all of the tags that were firing through TagMan’s system enabled Virgin to identify which vendors to contact for information about each vendor cookie being set.

Learn more about privacy changes from the experts at Forrester by watching the video of our joint webinar ‘Getting ePrivacy Ready’ or viewing the slides.

Our customers want the ability to manage their tag and cookie data activities seamlessly and efficiently. Thanks to this new partnership, our customers can customize the privacy messaging and functionality they offer to their website visitors, specified to their business needs. We believe users will benefit from this privacy tool, which will let them control their data collection preferences.

As our CEO, Paul Cook, explains, “This partnership enables us to combine the best of both systems and offer a highly sophisticated, integrated privacy tool for our clients. The new ePrivacy Directive and other privacy regulations around the globe will make website owners directly responsible for the control of tags and cookies related to privacy. We want our client to have full control through this tool in order to remain compliant.”

Check out this diagram that explains the partnership or check out our press release for more details.

Here Anthony Mullen, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research and Angus Glover Wilson, Chief Privacy Officer at TagMan answer your questions from the presentation on Thursday, March 29, 2012.

Q: Which privacy regulations in Europe will require a different approach to collecting data than the legislation/regulations in the U.S.?

A: Despite the fact that there are different legislative/regulatory regimes in the EU and US, the practical solutions are really quite similar in practice: “Do-Not-Track”, tag management, consent mechanisms, ad choices, industry self-regulation, and end user education, among other solutions.

Q: What is the current state of technology solutions like the government proposed idea of DNT? 

A: Both in the UK and the US, the regulators are making noise that Do-Not Track (DNT) can be a viable ePrivacy technology solution.

Two examples:

ICO News Release on March 8th: “Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said: One option being considered is to allow consent to the use of cookies to be given via browser settings.”

FTC Release on March 26th: “Do-Not-Track” – The Commission commends the progress made in this area: browser vendors have developed tools to allow consumers to limit data collection about them, the Digital Advertising Alliance has developed its own icon-based system and also committed to honor the browser tools, and the World Wide Web Consortium standards-setting body is developing standards. “The Commission will work with these groups to complete implementation of an easy-to-use, persistent, and effective Do-Not-Track system.”

Q: What do we have to do to comply? And, how do we do so without completely interrupting the user experience?”

A: Browser DNT will likely be a large part of the solution in the medium term. In the immediate term, given the lack of clear unambiguous guidance from regulators, any legitimately reasonable presentation of cookie information and an opt-out mechanism is likely good enough to show necessary good intentions to regulators should they ask.

Q: How much of a problem is it to work with European publishers; could they employ a different type of universal tag in order to comply with the ePrivacy directives that apply to them? Is this technologically possible?

A: Enterprise tag management systems such as TagMan should be able to help their clients manage their tags and cookies on a per domain, per country, per visitor basis. As TagMan is a global provider we can do all this and have been able to manage privacy from the launch of our platform in 2007.

Q: How will a browser-based Do-Not-Track mechanism interact with my tracking for analytics and OBA?

A: If your analytics and OBA vendor, or the tag management system which runs those vendor tags on your website, honor DNT, then you will see ‘blind spots’ in your data within those vendor systems, in direct proportion to the % of your web visitors who have DNT enabled. TagMan currently sees about 1% of our containers served to DNT-enabled Internet users.

Q: When it comes to Do-Not-Track , what does TagMan do that a browser DNT button does not?

A: The ‘missing’ link of DNT is connecting the dots from the Internet user’s desire to “not be tracked” to the website owner’s obligation to honor that desire, according to the relevant laws, regulations that the website owner has to comply with, and therefore the privacy ‘contract’ they make with their site visitors. Tag management systems which observe DNT provide that link by allowing website owners to decide which tags (and therefore cookies) they do and do not serve/drop to DNT-enabled visitors.

Q: Can you explain the integration between tag management solutions and consent solutions like Evidon?

A: With respect to ePrivacy, Tag Management can help control the ‘site-side’ tag/cookie opt-out process, allowing website owners absolute and final control over which tags and cookies they allow to be served to their visitors. Consent solutions such as Evidon control ‘vendor-side’ opt-outs allowing Internet users to control if/how they are tracked in general by tracing companies across the Internet at large (not site-specific). We see these two mechanisms as very much complementary.

If you didn’t manage to attend the webinar, learn more by watching the video of our joint webinar ‘Getting ePrivacy Ready’ or viewing the slides.

Erin Polka, iPerceptions

Guest Blog by Erin Polka, Marketing Director, iPerceptions

In November 2011, we at iPerceptions analyzed the top500 retail websites to determine how many were using web analytics tools. Online retailers are recognized leaders when it comes to integrating new web applications. A fast-growing, conversion-driven group, their choices often foreshadow those of other industries.

Our research found only 2% of IR500 is not using webanalytics tools with Google Analytics is still the major provider. But, interestingly we also found, the use of other, lesser-known clickstream and other web analytics tools is increasing. Let me share the 5 top charts of this research with you.

The use of clickstream analytics was nearly universal among retail websites in 2011. There has been a steady increase in usage over the last 3 years, as retailers relied more and more on clickstream data to make website and business decisions. Only 2% of the top IR500 were not using clickstream technology.

* Percentages add up to more than 100% as some retailers use more than one clickstream analytics tool.

Among the dominant clickstream analytics vendors, Google was the only one to gain market share in 2011. Adobe (Omniture) and IBM (Coremetrics, Unica) maintained their retail website presence. IBM’s Coremetrics has declined in popularity, likely due to its acquisition of Unica. There has been a significant increase in the presence of “Other” vendors, including Quantcast, ComScore, SpecificMedia, Yahoo! and WebTrends.

In addition to the increase in the use of clickstream analytics, there were notable increases for just about every other category of web analytics. In 2011, more than half of all retail websites used ad network tools (up from one third) and the use of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) more than doubled to 20%. Voice of Customer (VoC) tools, such as iPerceptions’ webValidator Continuous Listening Solution and 4Q Suite, gained significant market share, suggesting that retailers are putting a stronger emphasis on Voice of Customer and online customer experience measurement tools.

One of the biggest trends in 2011 was retail websites’ implementation of multiple vendors and tool types. Until this year, the use of more than one tool was unusual, with the majority of retailers making decisions based on a single source of information. The use of multiple tools nearly doubled between 2010 and 2011, as retailers began to realize the importance of addressing the entire website visitor experience.

In 2010, retail websites that were using more than one web analytics tool were almost certainly using Google Analytics. This decreased in 2011, with other vendors and tools being selected as the secondary solutions of choice. 2011 also saw a substantial increase in the share of retailers employing 4 or more tools, up to 15%, versus 1% just one year ago.

In conclusion, Clickstream analytics has become a de facto standard for the retail industry and Google Analytics is still the reigning champ. That said, the use of other, lesser-known clickstream and other web analytics tools is increasing among retailers. Nearly two thirds of retail websites ran more than one tool in 2011, which is a major jump compared to the previous year when one tool was often deemed sufficient.

Erin is web enthusiast and author, with many publications to her name. At iPerceptions, Erin is responsible for researching, developing and implementing a marketing, communications and public relations strategy that delivers key messages to a global audience and maximizes sales. The analysis for this blogpost employed iPerceptions’ Web Analytics Solution Profiler (WASP) tool. Specifically, the homepages of the Internet Retailer Top 500 Retail Websites were loaded into the WASP Pro version crawler and produced detailed web analytics tool information for the 493 websites that were operational at the time of the study.  

Join guest speaker Anthony Mullen, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research and Angus Glover Wilson, Chief Privacy Officer at TagMan for this 45-minute webinar Thursday, March 29, 2012 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT where you’ll learn about:

• The legal imperative – timelines, EU developments (‘Cookie Directive’)
• The ePrivacy landscape – now and in the future
• The role cookies play – awareness and management
• Tag Management for ePrivacy compliance
• Top tips on what you can do to get ready

To register, click this link

This despite evidence that shoppers are becoming increasingly social, with 58% of online consumers having “followed” a retailer through Facebook, Twitter or a retailer’s blog.

While retail travel sites generally feature less shareable content than publishers, we have to wonder if these sites, whose conversions are so vulnerable to page-load time, are especially wary of the extra load time accompanied with installing social plugins. Just one second delay in page-load can cause 7% loss in customer conversions. If these travel retail sites are missing out on a valuable opportunity due to concerns about extra load time, they might want to talk with TagMan about our Smart Tag Loading functionality built into our latest release.

This despite evidence that shoppers are becoming increasingly social, with 58% of online consumers having “followed” a retailer through Facebook, Twitter or a retailer’s blog.

While retail travel sites generally feature less shareable content than publishers, we have to wonder if these sites, whose conversions are so vulnerable to page-load time, are especially wary of the extra load time accompanied with installing social plugins. Just one second delay in page-load can cause 7% loss in customer conversions. If these travel retail sites are missing out on a valuable opportunity due to concerns about extra load time, they might want to talk with TagMan about our Smart Tag Loading functionality built into our latest release.

Slow Loading Tags

According to a recent article in NY times Impatient Web-Users Flee Slow Loading Sites, 400 milliseconds is too long. Thirty-seven percent of consumers find performance issues when visiting a website unacceptable, and 86% of users will leave a site after having bad experiences, according to another study from Compuware.

When it comes to tracking what consumer’s are doing on websites, marketers need to use many third-party tags from web analytics, email, search, ad servers, online testing, behavioral targeting, social media, and more. These systems get very complex and often use Javascript which can slow pages down, making it harder to track conversions especially when the user experience has been compromised. See this Compuware Load Testing Infographic to view key findings from their survey and learn exactly how slow tags, that result in poor page performance, negatively impacts your bottom line. In fact we proved in our recent study that, “Just One Second Delay In Page-Load Can Cause 7% Loss In Customer Conversions.”

We’ve developed a list of four important questions that every marketer should ask their IT departments (or vendors) about their site’s tags:

1. Are our site’s tags loading asynchronously? This enables the site’s tags  to load independently to the rest of the page, rather than sequentially which ultimately increases page load time.

2. Can our suppliers guarantee the speed of their tags? Understanding the speed of all of your site’s tags will better help you understand overall page-load times.

3. Are we using a high-end tag management system? Essentially, high-end tag management systems can force thresholds, and not every tag management system can guarantee this so beware. 

4. What impact will our site’s speed have on conversions? Website optimization with a tag management system can improve your site’s speed bringing you more visitors who stick around and ultimately improve your conversion rates. Use the real-time ROI calculator to see how much revenue you potentially can gain speeding up your site by 1, 2 or 3 second, based on real client data.

Learn more about optimizing page-load times by downloading (or forwarding to your IT team) TagMan’s latest white paper, “Smart Loading Tags to Accelerate Your Website’s Performance.”

We partnered with the UK’s leading glasses e-tailor Glasses Direct to study page speed and conversion behavior. Our study enabled us to build a case for the true correlation between page speed and dollar values. Our findings substantiated the Aberdeen findings, where increases in page-load time significantly impacted conversion rates, dropping by 7%.

In order to get these findings, we monitored both page performance and revenue on the Glasses Direct Site.  From the monitoring, we measured the impact of average paid-load time a user experienced to their likelihood to convert on the site.

We found there were significant correlations between page-load time and the likelihood of a user to convert. Here’s what we learned:

• When page-load time increases, likely conversion rates dropped by 6.7%. In the above graph you can see conversion peaking at around 2 seconds. This confirms the findings summarized in the KISSMetrics Infographic showing 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. After this peak the rate drops by 6.7% for each additional second.

• Page-load time for non-converters, users who abandoned the page without converting, was 3-to-4 times higher than for converters. This indicates that visitors who aren’t taking any actions on your site may have abandoned because of the page delays.

• We calculated lost revenue for each additional second a site takes to load. Let’s say a website’s average ticket size is $75 and conversion rate is 5%. So if it takes their pages an additional second to load then for every 400,000 unique visits each month, there would be a loss of $1.3m in revenue per year.

Or to put it in other words, you could gain this revenue by speeding up your site just by 1 second. These findings are very important to TagMan as we have developed our latest version of our Tag Management Platform which optimizes page load time for all tags Smart Tag Loading.

Glasses Direct, our partner in this study, speaks on the findings. “Site speed is the most important aspect of our business,” says Oliver Elliott, Head of Digital Marketing at Glasses Direct. “Seeing this direct impact on our site visitors’ experience and how it impacts their ability to convert to customers makes us even more obsessed about our site’s speed and the overall experience we’re delivering.”

To find out how much impact an additional second load time can have on your revenue, try the calculations for yourself using our Conversion Loss Calculator. You can use a slider to apply the Glasses Direct findings to your website stats and find out how much revenue you could gain.