An interview with Ali Behnam, CEO of Tealium, a pioneer in the enterprise tag management industry.
Still in its infancy, the tag management industry is already transforming how marketers manage data collection by giving them the power to do their own tag implementations. Why is that so significant? Anametrix CMO Pelin Thorogood talked with Ali Behnam about the ways that tag management enables marketers to directly manage tags, and enable centralized data collection across the full customer journey in the digital world. Ali offered a visionary’s view of the industry and the benefits to both marketing and IT. He co-founded Tealium in 2008 and leads this high-growth company from offices in Del Mar, Ca.
Tag management has been very popular over the last year. What’s driving the need?
Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of tags used for data collection by different vendors. In fact, there are now more than 2,000 tag-based digital marketing solutions. Not all of these solutions are large; some are actually very small. But the reason that tags have proliferated is that they provide an efficient method of data collection.
In the old days, before cloud-based web analytics, online data collection required marketing to ask IT to go into every server, collect the logs, use software to merge the data, clean the data, and then transfer the data to the vendor to make sense of it. This was a very expensive and labor-intensive process. Back in the mid 1990s, companies like WebSideStory and Omniture (now Adobe SiteCatalyst) were the first to discover that tags were an easier, more accurate, faster and less expensive way to collect data.
But here’s the problem – while marketing owns measurement, IT owns tagging because tagging has required technical knowledge of JavaScript coding language. Tealium changes that game. Tag management is all about giving marketers without those technical skills the ability to manage tags with a simple user interface. No knowledge of JavaScript required. With tag management, marketing gets to control its own destiny when it comes to data collection and managing online solutions. It also helps relieve the burden on IT.
When you ask a highly trained web developer to add tags to a web site, it’s somewhat like asking a Cordon Bleu chef to make a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s not a job IT welcomes. Tag management provides instant relief to both marketing and IT.
What’s your vision for the tag management industry – where is it going?
If you really look at total customers using a tag management system, compared to the addressable market, the industry is very young. But that will change. Tealium’s vision is “tag management simplified.” Our goal over the next three years is to enable our customers – non-technical marketers – to handle 100 percent of the tag management operation quickly and simply. This focus has helped us gain strong market traction, and we now have more than 130 customers on five different continents.
What are some of the primary use cases for tag management? How are customers benefiting?
There are four primary use cases: increasing marketing agility, freeing up IT resources, improving web site performance and enhancing privacy compliance. I’ll talk about the first two, which are most relevant to digital marketers.
Marketing agility — let’s say someone comes in and says, “we plan to sell this excess inventory online at a discount within the next week. We need a tag right away on the web site to measure results.” If marketing has to rely on a development resource, the tag deployment may not happen on time because companies often times have to go through release cycles that cannot be changed. No one knows that better than digital marketers. This kind of agility — the ability to act quickly — drives marketing velocity. Marketing teams can launch more campaigns and drive more revenue when they control their own tag management, rather than getting IT involved. That translates into better marketing ROI.
Another common area where we see the need for agility is around web analytics. That’s because in web analytics, requirements always change and are a moving target. Change in requirements often mean the need to edit the tags. Our analytics customers can make those changes on the fly without burdening their IT teams. One of our customers really summed it up in a recent interview we did on our blog. Jason Paulsen, global analytics manager at Avnet (NYSE:AVT), was at a web site redesign meeting when the team realized it was missing information about how many visitors view their site in different languages. In the middle of the meeting, Jason opens his laptop, launches the Tealium console, creates a new data variable and starts sending the data into Adobe SiteCatalyst. By the end of the meeting, he had preliminary results about language use to support the site redesign. Imagine having to go through a release cycle for this information.
What are some of the most common tags for Tealium to manage?
In addition to all the web analytics vendors, which have been the leading focus for tags, we also see a lot of tags for online advertising, including Google AdWords and DoubleClick. We see a lot of search engine marketing tags, marketing automation, personalization and more. We can support any tag out there, but one of our big differentiators is that we offer turnkey integration with hundreds of online vendors. This makes it very easy for digital marketers to add major vendors with a few clicks of the mouse.
How do you see the relationship between big data, analytics and tag management evolving?
Tag management is really an enablement platform for big data. It won’t solve all the problems, but we can deal with the digital portion. Whether the data comes from a web site, mobile app, video or another source, tag management allows companies to standardize data collection within those channels. And it gives companies the ability to create the role of the chief data officer, who can help manage these digital channels and simplify digital analytics.
What’s next for Tealium?
The future is all about tag management simplified. Our goal is to give marketing and business users the ability to tackle 100 percent of tag management tasks themselves. With Tealium, marketing gains the agility it needs to incorporate new concepts, fix problems and drive more effective campaigns. What’s at stake is a consistent view of the customer journey over all digital channels, and the ability to drive more value for the business.
Thanks for the insights, Ali! We, at Anametrix, are big believers in tag management – which is why we offer instant digital analytics deployment via Tealium tags. As our CTO Anders Olsson said, “Our integration with Tealium is a game-changer because now, organizations can deploy analytics solutions like Anametrix in a fraction of the time – minimizing cost and complexity.”