Ensighten takes $40M to remove the clutter from marketers’ toolboxes

Marketers have a whole bunch of tools at their disposal to track who’s seeing websites and whether they view ads, by embedding a few lines of code, known as tags, within websites. Managing the tags from each tool ain’t easy.

Which is why tag-management software has taken off. Providers of this software make it easier to explore findings from the tags and quickly add or remove tags from one central point. And that sort of technology to observe behavior and improve the value of sites can help marketers get the most out of their marketing spend.

Today one tag-management software vendor, Ensighten, is announcing a $40 million round of venture funding from Insight Venture Partners.

Ensighten has now raised $55.5 million since starting up at the end of 2009. The new money will go toward Ensighten’s sales and marketing efforts, with the goal of getting many more businesses using the company’s software, the company’s founder and chief executive, Josh Manion, told VentureBeat.

Big companies like Microsoft, Sony, Staples, Subaru, and United Airlines already use Ensighten. Their marketers needn’t check disparate a bunch of marketing software applications, in addition to social networks, ad servers, and other places for data on consumer interaction with individual web pages. Instead, the analytics are all aggregated in one place. Ensighten users can also integrate additional data, like past purchases, and export everything to business-intelligence tools for further analysis.

If Ensighten wants to grow further, it needs to beat out formidable competitors.

Ensighten goes up against “marketing clouds” from software sellers like Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce.com. Ensighten also must put up with Google, which offers software called Tag Manager, and fellow tag-management vendors like BrightTag and Impact Radius.

Manion thinks his company can stand out because it doesn’t directly provide tags that track consumer usage of websites but instead provides a way to manage all of the tags a company already has in place.

“Our independence and focus on building this as sort of a customer-centric platform is a huge value to our customers, because we’re not biased in the sense of trying to sell all this tag-based technology to them, but instead we’re trying to give them the ability to choose which provider to work with,” Manion said.

Funding for Ensighten, which is based in Cupertino, Calif., comes during a prolonged period of customer and investor interest in tools that can help marketers attain competitive advantages. It’s all happening in the run-up to 2017, by which point the chief marketing officer will spend more on IT than the chief information officer, analyst firm Gartner has predicted.

Marketing automation has been especially hot as of late. Perhaps the same frenzy will come to the tag-management domain.