It’s no secret that every time you visit a website, you are opening yourself up to become a potential customer to a slew of marketers. What you may not know, though, is how that works.
When you visit a site, these things called tags track everything you do. They send data about a web page, and page visitors, to third-party vendors who provide digital marketers with marketing data and services.
As you might imagine, popular websites can wind up with a whole lot of tags, which can slow down the site. That is where tag management companies come in. They help the sites, and marketers, sort through all of that data and simplify it.
One company that provides such services is Ensighten, which announced on Wednesday that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The round was led Insight Venture Partners.
The company has now raised $55.5 million, including it’s $15.5 million Series A, which was led by Volition Capital, with participation from Eastern Advisors and Floodgate Fund, in September 2012.
Ensighten says that it will use the funding in order to expand its global footprint by increasing sales and marketing operations.
The Cupertino, California-based Ensighten was founded in 2009 by former competitive chess player Josh Manion. It enables businesses to manage their websites more effectively by replacing hundreds of lines of code with a just single line.
Tag management is important to the overall functionality of a website’s performance; tags can add hundreds of lines of JavaScript code to a Web page, and can slow page load performance. Ensighten enables digital marketers to easily deploy, and manage, all third-party tags from a single Web interface.
Ensighten processes tag requests from 30,000 Web domains across 150 countries, representing more than $30 billion in e-commerce for top brands. The company currently serves nearly a quarter of the Fortune 50, and 30% of the top 20 Web retailers as ranked by IRCE.
Its list of customers includes Capital One, E-Trade, MetLife, Microsoft, monster.com, Safeway, Sony Electronics, Staples, Symantec, T-Mobile, United Airlines and Wal-Mart.
Tag management space
Ensighten is one of the biggest players in the tag management space, but is not the only company to have recently raised funding,
Tealium, a maker of enterprise tag management technology, raised $15.6 million in Series C financing from Tenaya Capital, Battery Ventures and Presidio Ventures in April of 2013.
In August 2013, TagMan secured another $5 million from Greycroft Partners, iNovia Capital and Silicon Valley Bank.
BrightTag, a marketing solutions provider for eCommerce and retail companies, raised $27 million led by Yahoo! JAPAN, along with Baird Capital, EPIC Ventures, I2A, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and TomorrowVentures.
Ensighten was not available for any further comment.
(Image source: http://www.ensighten.com)