Tags are the key to understanding visitor behavior for any web business, but installing, serving, and managing them can be incredibly complicated and time-consuming. And it can also actually negatively affect page performance. Startup Ensighten wants to deliver tags as a service, making it scalable and incredibly fast, and today it’s announcing a $15.5 million Series A round led by Volition Capital, and including Eastern Advisors and Floodgate Fund to help it do that.
What Ensighten does with tags, which can be things like cookies, pixels, snippets of JavaScript or others that let users perform analtyics on their visitors and conversions, is to take a process that would take a huge team and constant vigilance if managed in-house and make it flexible without having to edit the page itself. Basically, it operates a CDN for tags, serving the right ones when needed, and only the right ones, leading to faster performance in terms of page load times for visitors. Ensighten also has mobile-specific offerings that take on the unique challenges on those platforms, such as more inconsistent data connections.
It’s a clever angle for a service that virtually anyone with a website needs, and one designed specifically to address the pain points of large enterprise customers who might have to manage thousands of tags across a huge number of properties. In an interview, CEO Josh Manion explained that Ensighten is a no-brainer for those kinds of clients, especially since it means that staff working front-line in marketing can make changes to their tagging systems on the fly, initiating new tools and tweaking old ones.
“One of the biggest challenges that I saw among those customers is that they had just a total lack of marketing agility,” he said. “They would want to deploy a brand new technology, let’s say a multivariate testing tool, but it would take them six months or even more before their IT departments would let them make those changes, and then another six months to make a change.”
Manion said that this round of funding will go toward continued global expansion (Ensighten opened European offices in April), and that it’ll help further marketing efforts to get the word out about its services. Ensighten has a good lead in this space, and this funding should help it maintain that, especially since competitor Tealium just raised $10.5 million to grow its own business.