Tag/data vendor Ensighten adds Anametrix analytics to its growing marketing cloud

(Updated 10.15.14 at 8:12am PT with additional information.)

Tag and data management platform Ensighten is continuing its buying spree, announcing this morning the purchase of marketing analytics firm Anametrix.

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The San Jose, Calif.-based Ensighten is not shy about its ambition. When it purchased rival tag management company TagMan in March, it specifically touted the acquisition as another step in its quest to “take on the Adobe Marketing Cloud.” In January, Ensighten scored a $40 million funding round.

“We see ourselves as the next generation digital marketing platform,” CEO and founder Josh Manion told VentureBeat.

“Part of this is tag management,” he said, “but it’s also data management, and, with the Anametrix purchase, it’s also data analytics.”

Digital marketing tags are a few lines of code on each webpage, and they can be managed through a system that resides on-site or in the cloud. The tags can then be used to track users’ activity, and to direct such forms of digital marketing as affiliate marketing, personalization, SEO, shopping comparison engines, display or paid search advertising, or site analytics.

The company will still provide platform data to the tools that customers want to use, he said, but the acquisition “also gives us the ability to do the low-hanging fruit in the platform.”

That fruit, he said, could include something as extensive as determining the “lifetime value” of a customer. Anametrix offers the ability to bring in other data besides the transactions and impressions stored in Ensighten, he said, such as call center data.

The terms of the purchase were not made public. Anametrix, with headquarters in San Diego, was founded in 2010 by the analytics team from WebSideStory. Ensighten said the San Diego office will be enlarged with more team members, and an Anametrix office in France will remain as is.

Ensighten describes itself these days as a global omnichannel data and tag management provider, a mouthful that represents its determination to make its open Agile Marketing Platform into more of a force to be reckoned with. Manion points to such Ensighten differentiators as enterprise customers owning their data as first-party and acting on it in real-time.

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Will Ensighten add the kinds of tools — email, social media marketing — that fullscale marketing platforms offer?

Manion said the company’s approach “for a lot of basic tools is to partner with other companies,” although he left open the possibility of acquisitions to fill those gaps.