Oracle Marketing Cloud embraces Ghostery, a tool that shows you how many ad trackers are on a page

Ghostery is primarily known for its consumer offering, a browser extension lets you see — and block — web trackers and web ads.

Today the company is launching a new app on the Oracle Marketing AppCloud, TrackerMap Live, that marketers, not just consumers, can use. The app provides marketers visibility into the third-party tags and cookies on their own — and competitors’ — websites. Those third-party tags (short snippets of code) indicate the presence of marketing and advertising technologies like ad networks, analytics tools, and social media widgets.

According to a recent Ghostery study, most company websites have approximately 70 different types of third-party code or tags on their websites — and only know about one-third of them. (A Ghostery check this morning showed between 34 and 38 on VentureBeat’s home page, depending on which ad networks were appearing on the page when it loaded.)

Marketers today have to balance growing consumer privacy concerns with the ability to deliver and optimize an optimal customer experience. Putting lots of widgets and trackers on a website can slow its performance, making pages load slowly, for instance. As the number of advertising and marketing technologies available grow, keeping track of and monitoring them all becomes challenging.

Marketers can use TrackerMap Live not only to see the technologies on their pages, but to understand which ones are slowing down the website and which violate security or privacy policies.

With the addition of Ghostery, Oracle continues to bolster its Marketing Cloud offering, which competes with those of Salesforce, Adobe, IBM, and several others. For more, see our full report on marketing clouds.