THE ENSIGHTEN PROMISE. The Power to Collect, Own and Activate Omni-Channel Data

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1 THE ENSIGHTEN PROMISE The Power to Collect, Own and Activate Omni-Channel Data

2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Pure client-side or pure server-side tag management systems (TMS) suffer from critical limitations: The range of technologies they deploy, the extent they can scale and perform, and how and when they leverage multi-channel visitor data are all severely limited. These drawbacks leave marketers with diminished ability to innovate or fully benefit from the agility promised by tag management. Marketers get locked into expensive and poorly integrated closed suites of products, which give website visitors less than optimal experiences on par with websites not using tag management at all.

3 Ensighten is different. It offers an open platform, single line of code deployment, and a hybrid tagging architecture powered by a proprietary tag delivery network built to streamline tag code delivery. Ensighten customers use the open platform to integrate and orchestrate any digital technology that suits their business to activate customer data everywhere. Ensighten draws customer data from online, offline and offsite touch points, and uniquely gives marketers the ability to execute 1:1 marketing in real time across any channel and platform, without limits.

4 WHO SHOULD READ THIS EBOOK Digital marketing practitioners and executives in enterprise organizations will find this ebook useful for creating a business case for adopting an omni-channel data and tag management solution. This ebook describes the differences between client-side tagging and server-side tagging, closed and open platforms, first-party data ownership and third-party data, content delivery networks and tag delivery networks, and lengthy schedules versus real-time marketing agility. After reading this ebook, marketers will understand what true marketing agility is, and why it is an imperative. It s what Ensighten delivers every day for hundreds of the biggest brands in the world, at scale and no other TMS can do the same. This is the story of how we got here.

5 IN THE BEGINNING... Digital technologies developed in lock step with the Internet itself, giving marketers more and more ways to derive ROI from their digital assets. Analytics, paid search, affiliates, display ads, , or other marketing campaigns the list continues to grow, with each new vendor adding more features and capabilities at a dizzying rate, while existing technologies fight to keep up. Focusing on the problem of just getting tags on the website, early tag management tools sought to help businesses centralize the deployment of all those programs through a single container tag. Saving time deploying and managing tags, while streamlining internal processes, was the whole point of these early systems.

6 Simply speeding deployment of the base tag on the site, however, is a far cry from wringing every ounce of value from the use of a technology; it must be deployed intelligently across multiple touch points and fed with all the data it can handle to be truly effective. This is where existing TMS solutions reach their limit.

7 Tag management should go all the way or go home. The value of tag management is eliminated as soon as you have a system that only works for some tags but not for others. JOSH MANION FOUNDER AND CEO OF ENSIGHTEN

8 A technology s tag is the gateway to its data. By unlocking the data within the digital technologies, using intelligence about the visitor to determine when to bring each technology to bear, and easing integration between the technologies, tag management has the potential to uniquely craft personalized customer experiences in real time, not just on the website, but across channels and devices.

9 Without advanced tag management, marketers are at the mercy of long deployment cycles required to implement marketing technologies often 4 to 12 months. MANAGE For those locked in these cycles, the process often goes like this: the marketing team asks the IT department to deploy a new technology, then they wait for IT to work it into their long list of priorities. By the time the IT team makes the change, the technology is frequently outdated and the marketing campaign is set back. Lengthy deployment schedules cannot keep pace with the constantly evolving world of digital marketing. A lot can happen while a tagging change request is in the queue.

10 Before Ensighten, it was very archaic. There was no governance over tag implementation. Everything had to be run by IT. We also were not able to scale over time. With Ensighten, IT involvement went from minimal to none. Learn more.

11 Marketers who seek greater agility quickly discover they are limited by which tags they can functionally deploy within those systems. Due to their complexity and data hungry nature, analytics, personalization, optimization, MVT testing and other important capabilities have to reside outside the TMS in order to fully function. This creates duplicate processes, and duplicate work. Simple tags and pixels deployed through the TMS allows marketers to operate independently of IT deployment cycles, but highly critical technologies unable to be deployed within the TMS are bound to the same old pre-tms schedules.

12 Even though it is apparent that container tags are falling short, other TMS vendors continue to build them because they help address, in part, the problem of speeding up deployment cycles. And today, this is a value any TMS can bring as long as the scope and scale is limited to very simple use cases in small environments. Ensighten understood from the beginning that it isn t just about creating a container tag to speed up deployment. The real problem is lack of marketing agility. The solution has to be about enabling innovation, and the ability to use marketing technology, logic and data to do new, effective and wonderful things online.

13 With Ensighten, we test whether this tag or that tag will have an impact on conversions. Ensighten enables us to use best-of-breed solutions. Learn more.

14 Ensighten s open platform scales and supports every digital marketing technology and every way a marketer wants to use it across and within any environment. This is essential for marketing innovation and agility. This gives brands an enterprise infrastructure of unlimited capacity, while also providing a simple deployment methodology for easy implementation.

15 This idea became Ensighten s mantra.

16 Tag Delivery Network: Gateway to marketing innovation and agility

17 Container tags, no matter how intelligent, can get away with leveraging a content delivery network (CDN) because by their nature they are static. Using a container delivered by a CDN is a cheap and effective way to quickly ease deployment pain. But there is a flaw in this approach CDNs by nature can t react to the ever-changing behaviors of individual visitors and their expectations for a seamless and personalized experience online. This is important, as conditional rules for firing tags and sending data becomes complex very quickly. When conditional logic is forced onto the browser with a solution that doesn t have dynamic decision making capability, the capabilities of a static solution are soon reached, and performance of the web page is bogged down significantly as a result. This forces marketers to choose between managing certain technologies and data mapping outside of the TMS, or keeping use cases very simple, compromising agility.

18 Ensighten took a totally different approach, leveraging the power of distributed servers, by building a dedicated, dynamic tag delivery network (TDN). It scales, supports any environment, and creates a backbone for much more than tag management. Only a TDN, built to host tags, can support all the conditional logic and data mapping while also keeping the impact on web pages very light.

19 We saw reduced page load time by an average of 2.72 seconds.

20 WHAT IS A TDN? The Ensighten tag delivery network (TDN) is a high-availability, high-performance, geographically redundant network of interconnected data centers provided by leading cloud and virtual private server (VPS) vendors. Simply put, the TDN is hundreds of servers distributed across dozens of locations around the world backing each other up and intelligently delivering tags on demand.

21 For the first time, Ensighten is enabling us to pull everything together (1.5M+ webpages) and deploy the consistent standards and tracking that are critical for optimizing the consumer experience.

22 A key capability and design decision driver for Ensighten is the dynamic delivery of content to website visitors of Ensighten s clients. Unlike a content delivery network (CDN) that must send every logical condition about how and when to deploy tags, where to find the data to feed them and how to translate it across every solution, the TDN decides exactly which tags and data mappings to send to the browser based on the situation and data at hand. By offloading decision making to a powerful set of servers, rather than relying on a browser to parse and determine what to do, page loads are faster and the visitor experience is better, regardless of the unique number of ways the system is configured.

23 The Hybrid Tagging Backstory

24 In the TMS world, there are two ways to handle the conditional logic required to load tags in the browser: client-side or server-side. Pure client-side tagging, which leverages a CDN, is problematic because it pushes all the conditional logic to the browser. Over time, the browser cannot handle the hundreds of thousands of variations that can occur with the complex conditional logic necessary to extract maximum value from the technologies being deployed. Although many marketers use a TMS not just to speed deployment of tags, but also to speed page load, clientside conditional logic often makes the page load slower than with no TMS at all. This is particularly true for enterprise organizations or any organization with a desire to use visitor data to make decisions and power integrations.

25 According to a Forrester study, consumers become impatient when pages take longer than two seconds to load, and that 40% of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site. Both Aberdeen Research Group and Gomez report that a one-second delay in site load results in a 7% reduction in conversions.

26 Pure server-side tagging attempts to solve for the limitation of client-side containers, but is equally problematic because it relies on pre-built integrations. Server-side tagging also inherently sacrifices the opportunity of leveraging browser data and bringing detailed browser elements into the data layer. Not only does server-side tagging limit the potential data unification and activation made possible by tag management, but it also limits the types of tags that can actually be deployed through the tag management system in the first place.

27 ENSIGHTEN S HYBRID SYSTEM LEVERAGES STRENGTHS OF BOTH CLIENT-SIDE AND SERVER-SIDE TAGGING. Ensighten s hybrid tagging and TDN approach unifies all tagging efforts, including analytics and optimization deployments, across every digital touch point. The hybrid architecture minimizes data and tag code that gets pushed to the client, speeding up page load by 40%. Marketers can easily launch flicker-free tests or targets and immediately promote test winners across your web site with zero IT reliance. And Ensighten ensures all analytics tags fire at just the right time, so you never miss out on critical visitor tracking or conversion data. Even better, Ensighten remains fast as your sophistication and use of data grows. Learn more. HIGH PERFORMANCE AT ANY SCALE DATA COLLECTION, OWNERSHIP, ACTION ENSIGHTEN TDN Server-side conditional logic with fastest code delivery powers global scalability, privacy, and data activation. ON-SITE DATA PROVIDERS OMNI-CHANNEL ENHANCEMENT PRIVACY COMPLIANCE OFF-SITE OFFLINE

28 CLOSED VS. OPEN PLATFORM WHY IT MATTERS Everywhere you look, vendors are pushing their version of the marketing cloud. Vendors are not growing this mix of digital tools organically, but instead are relying on acquisition to quickly build up a portfolio of technologies. Cloud vendors then focus all their efforts on back-end integrations trying to add value to their suite, while competitive independent tools are free to innovate and provide new ways to enhance the visitor experience. Even ignoring the slowed pace of innovation of individual tools, the promise of a closed suite is tantalizing to some marketers: obtain all digital marketing technologies through a single vendor and there should be (theoretically) better integrations and less manual effort on the part of the marketer. But in practice it doesn t work this way, especially for those marketers who have a solid understanding of what their business needs. A single vendor s tools may not be able to meet their unique requirements. In fact, they rarely do. Here s why:

29 A closed suite closes in on itself. It offers the breadth of its own solutions, but inherently can t keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital marketplace. Its offerings are limited from the start, and the promise of integration often falls short.

30 Ensighten s open platform is the unifying centerpiece for any custom marketing cloud. It eliminates the need for a cloud suite of solutions that are integrated through a single marketing technology vendor because Ensighten can power complex integrations on the client side, rather than integration through back-end APIs. Using this unique capability, Ensighten customers are free to choose a custom, best-of-breed mix of technology solutions, rather than rely on whatever mix of products is being forced together through an acquisition suite.

31 ENSIGHTEN ENABLES DATA OWNERSHIP AND ACTIVATION Ensighten s client-server hybrid, TDN-based architecture is not only a TMS capable of scaling in order to handle any digital technology, but is also dynamically able to activate your data in real time while supporting full data ownership and 100% privacy compliance. This plays out for customers in key ways: Ensighten s single line of code is the gateway to making all of this possible. For many brands, what starts with tag management becomes the mechanism for data standardization and integration of data across all technologies and channels for optimized 1:1 customer experiences.

32 We leverage Ensighten to get the first party cookie to understand what s actually happening in display networks, paid search, , and social. We have that first party data and we can feed that to any attribution vendor. With this, we ve dramatically improved our advertising spend month over month. Learn more.

33 Ensighten s platform lets customers own their data all their data, not just some of it. By unifying all tag data through the Ensighten Data Layer, it is no longer necessary to rent data back from providers. It becomes first-party data forever, to leverage for truly personalized marketing without any third-party restrictions or costs. And only Ensighten s unique architecture is able to handle the complexity of this level of data activation and reuse. Ensighten enables this by standardizing visitor-level data so it can be used to make decisions on when to deploy technology. Learn more. MVT RECOMMENDATION SOCIAL PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION CHAT A/B VISUALIZATION ANALYTICS MARKETING AUTOMATION ECOMMERCE PERSONALIZATION SEO VOC Ensighten Data Layer Ensighten Data Layer unifies all customer data to activate more consistent personalization and optimal experiences everywhere they go.

34 Ensighten s open platform not only supports the most robust tag management solution in the market, but it provides the infrastructure for 1:1 marketing, including: Data activation onsite, offsite and offline without limits 100% privacy compliance, even for tags not deployed by Ensighten Mobile app optimization decoupled from the app development cycle Real-time marketing attribution with the ability to reduce costs automatically Continuously testing and implementing best-of-breed solutions No other TMS solution gives complete ownership of all your data like Ensighten.

35 IT ALL COMES BACK TO THE PLATFORM AND THE CUSTOMER No matter what mix of marketing technologies you use, how your environment grows, or how the omni-channel customer journey evolves, Ensighten s open platform supports it all. It s the TMS solution that truly delivers every tag and every use case at scale. Think of it as a way to future-proof marketing efforts. Only Ensighten is poised to deliver full customer experience management across all digital touch points. In an omni-channel world, being able to provide a personalized online experience across every device and channel is a remarkable thing.

36 ABOUT ENSIGHTEN Ensighten, the global leader in omni-channel data and tag management, is changing the face of digital marketing by transforming the way enterprises collect, own and act on their customer data across every marketing channel and device. Using the company s Agile Marketing Platform (AMP), enterprises can now achieve true 1:1 marketing while accelerating the execution of their marketing initiatives and delivering superior user experiences. Powered by its unique hybrid-tag technology, the Ensighten platform processes tag requests across 150+ countries, for companies transacting over $1.9 trillion in revenue. The world s leading brands (Microsoft, United Airlines, T-Mobile and Walmart) are achieving marketing agility through Ensighten s single line of code implementation.

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