Ensighten Acquires Anametrix, Tackles More Than Tags

Enterprise tag-management specialist Ensighten has acquired multichannel marketing analytics startup Anametrix for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced Wednesday.

The duo’s relationship dates back 18 months and had already manifested in a number of joint product integrations. Owning Anametrix was the natural next step, according to Ensighten’s founder and CEO, Josh Manion.

Anametrix was founded in 2010 by alums of WebSideStory (a web analytics tool acquired by Omniture in 2007) and employed 30, all of whom will join Ensighten. The acquisition adds an analytical backbone to what Ensighten calls its “Agile Marketing Platform.”

“We had already been able to collect and do some [analytical] reporting, but I wouldn’t have confidently said it was a next-generation platform prior,” Manion admitted.

Anametrix, according to CEO Pelin Thorogood, will enhance Ensighten’s tag data with insights around pricing and real-time trending topics, as well as offline data like call center logs.

Describing a use case for Anametrix, Thorogood said a number of automotive and retail brands use the platform to optimize marketing campaigns based on varying degrees of brand loyalty.

“Regardless of how much money was spent within a certain variant, we’re able to [see via] advanced analytics that it was really the number of orders the consumer made that was driving loyalty,” she said. “We defined loyalty by product segment and amount of money spent.” Anametrix also factored in such variants as season, product category and competitive intelligence.

Ensighten’s building its own version of a marketing stack. Most recently, the company acquired TagMan, which added attribution marketing, but the core of Ensighten’s offering is “Ensighten Activate,” its data-management platform, and “Ensighten Privacy,” a privacy management application independent from Ensighten’s TMS.

“Tag management is really about owning the customer relationship and driving a one-to-one interaction, rather than just getting a pixel to fire somewhere on your site,” Manion said. “One of the things we’re looking at is, as you create an offer and you want to deploy that consistently across your website, mobile apps, etc., ‘How do I do that in a way that doesn’t involve me going to 15 different [data] sources?’”

“We’re looking at that,” was Manion’s response when asked if Ensighten will make a bid for campaign execution, as Adobe did with Neolane. “I can’t say whether we will partner or buy in that area,” he said, but he noted that “when you have manual steps in a [marketing automation] process, that’s when you wind up with disjointed” data outputs.

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