Jim Sterne, founder of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) and eMetrics Summit, was the keynote speaker at Digital Velocity. In his presentation, “Nimble Digital Marketing Master,” Jim shared his thoughts on why a digital marketer’s job is (almost) impossible. Jim spent a few minutes with Erik Bratt, VP of Marketing at Tealium, to define “big data” and how tag management helps solve the big data problem.

Forrester Research’s Joe Stanhope, one of the industry’s leading authorities on tag management, recently gave his take on numerous hot topics, including the role of tag management in enabling big data initiatives, while attending Digital Velocity recently (see photos). Joe delivered one of the keynote presentations at the customer conference, which drew more than 200 attendees to Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego. See Joe’s presentation or get a free copy of Joe’s latest report, “Understanding Tag Management Tools & Technologies.”

We rocked out at the Hard Rock last week in San Diego. Our first annual user conference was a huge success and the team at Tealium is still riding on Cloud 9 from all the great responses we received from those in attendance. A sold out crowd of more than 200 customers, speakers, and special guests roamed “Abbey Road” (one of the Hard Rock’s cool murals) at Digital Velocity. We took tons of a few photos to capture the magic as it was happening. Check out our Facebook page or Flickr album to view some great shots. Thanks to all of those who have contributed to our growth thus far, and get ready for what’s in store!

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To the list of examples of how tag management increases marketing agility, add another: escaping the traditional holiday 'code freeze' that many online retailers implement during the ever-critical holiday shopping season.

The ‘code freeze’ is essentially a company-mandated lockdown on any web site changes or improvements in order to minimize the risk of errors and downtime that might effect the smooth flow of online purchases. This typically happens during the holiday season. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor's note: The following is an interview with Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner for Boston-based Battery Ventures, which yesterday announced that it has invested $10.5M in Series B financing into Tealium, the leader in enterprise tag management. Neeraj, who will sit on the board of directors at Tealium, was recently named to Forbes’ 2011 Midas List, which ranks the top technology investors in the world. His digital marketing technology investments include Omniture (now Adobe Systems), Marketo, Bazaarvoice, Sprinklr, and many more. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many benefits to tag management, but one of the most important is the ability to substantially improve web site performance.

Online retailer Fingerhut, part of Bluestem Brands, recently reported a dramatic 49 percent improvement in page speed through its checkout process by doing one thing: adding Tealium to its web site.

Tealium enables clients to improve site performance by 1) replacing dozens of digital marketing vendor tags with a single line of code, and 2) employing a variety of best practice techniques, including asynchronous tag loading, conditional tag loading, and slow-tag killing. Fingerhut used conditional tag loading to only load certain tags on its checkout pages, instead of loading all of its tags on every page hit.

Read the entire Bluestem Brands case study.

Editor's Note: The following is an interview with Jason Paulsen, global analytics manager at Avnet (NYSE: AVT), one of the largest distributors of electronic components. Jason got his first taste of analytics with eBay in 2004. He used Omniture data to help eBay’s power sellers increase their conversions rates. He then began working for Omniture directly in 2005. He left Omniture in 2009 to work for an independent consulting agency. He joined Avnet in 2011 and is in charge of the global analytics program for Avnet's e-commerce business group.

1. Tell us a little bit about Avnet and your role at the company.

Avnet is the world’s largest distributor of electronic components. Basically, we provide all the components that make up most electronic gadgets – from micro-processors to power supplies to connectors – that go into everything from smartphones to fighter jets. I manage the analytics globally for the e-commerce team.

2. When did you first hear about tag management?

I heard about tag management at Omniture’s Summit in 2011.

3. How many digital marketing vendor tags do you manage via Tealium?

We manage five unique vendor tags, but we have more than 30 accounts from one vendor that have to be managed individually within Tealium.

4. Who is your web analytics vendor(s)?

We currently use Omniture. I know I’m supposed to say Adobe, but I’m old school.

5. In what ways has tag management benefited you?

While I don’t have specific ROI numbers I can share, I can tell you that we have saved significant IT resources both from a cost perspective, and more importantly, from a “usage” perspective. With Tealium, I no longer have to take a spot in the IT project list. This means my team members can have their projects worked on sooner, which drives their business more quickly.

6. You told us a great anecdote recently about how you made some key web analytics changes during a meeting. Can you repeat that here?

We were in the middle of a site redesign. There were some interesting discussions regarding how many of our users view our site in different languages. We had not been tracking that value. So, in the middle of the meeting, I opened my laptop, logged into Tealium, created a new variable and started sending language usage data into Omniture. By the end of the meeting, I had some initial data to share with the team. This will help us determine what languages we should focus on supporting in our redesign.

7. What has your experience with Tealium been like?

My experience has been awesome so far. The support has been tremendous. I haven’t been able to come up with an issue that Tealium couldn’t handle.

8. What’s your next big web analytics project?

My next big project is the integration of our online data into our CRM systems. I’m hoping Tealium can play a role in that as well.

- Thanks Jason!

Editor's Note: The following is an interview with Gary Angel, President and CTO of Semphonic, a leading digital measurement and analytics consulting firm. Gary was recently named Most Influential Industry Contributor in the Digital Analytics Assocation's 2012 Awards for Excellence.

1. Tell us a little bit about Semphonic?

Semphonic is a digital measurement and analytics consultancy. I often stress the word analytics, because we focus on delivering actual site and digital channel analysis to our clients, most of whom are very large, multi-channel enterprise clients. Most agency and internal teams that describe themselves as web/digital analytics seem to be pretty much limited to tagging and reporting. Getting clients to the point where we can do real analysis has also pushed us to deliver both infrastructure (tagging) and reporting solutions and, increasingly, it's meant that we've been helping our clients drive analytics data out of traditional web analytics solutions into data warehousing. But the end goal is to drive change – and analysis is what does that.

2. When did tag management first come on your radar?

A couple years back. Seems like ages ago. I think the first real application we saw was actually with you guys. We had a client with a critical site section (The Account Application Process) that was built in  a manner that changes could only be done with a full development deployment cycle. So it took about six months to drop an image request on the page. And since it was the single most critical conversion point, they kept wanting to add tags.

3. What are some ways that tag management benefits web analytics?

Good analytics is dependent on good infrastructure. Costly, time-consuming infrastructure deployments greatly extend the time-to-benefit from analytics and can even chew up all the available measurement dollars.

Our team greatly prefers to do deployments these days with a Tag Management System (TMS). A TMS moves the bulk of the tagging work from IT to the measurement team. It's actually much easier for us, in most cases, to customize the tag than to explain to an IT team how to do it. It also puts us in control of the measurement. I think it makes for better and cheaper implementations.

Tag management also gives you much greater ability to tune and customize the tag without impacting site and IT cycles. That's critical because measurement is the tail, not the dog. Lots of measurement changes get de-prioritized or delayed when you have to run them through traditional IT cycles.

4. From an analytics standpoint, what are some of the signs that you may need a tag management system?

Honestly, I'm not sure you need signs. In my view, every tag deployment at the enterprise level would benefit from a TMS. But if I have to pick some signs, here they are:

• Governance issues with missing tags
• Measurement queue of tagging changes
• Reduced measurement designs to fit implementation cycles
• IT concerns with tag proliferation
• Constant changes to existing tags or foregone reporting because changes can't be made
• Page load performance issues from tags

5. What are some of the things you should look for in choosing a good TMS?

We're finding that the decision about a TMS blends two separate elements: IT and marketing. For years now marketing has been adding tags to the web site without a lot of feedback, governance or control. Interestingly, when it comes time to think about tag management, IT concerns tend suddenly to surface. That's not a bad thing. I think you want to look at a TMS that supports core IT concerns around page weight, performance, control, and reliability.

On the other hand, measurement is a marketing function. The single biggest reason (by far) for having a TMS is to create a system in which the actual measurement design can be quickly and seamlessly controlled without tying up IT cycles. The current system of tagging puts tremendous pressure on the design-cycle to create a comprehensive infrastructure. It makes for bulky implementation process – and makes it very challenging to work on any kind of an agile cycle.

So I think the features that matter most in a TMS are the ones designed to facilitate that flow: configurability of the measurement system from a GUI, ability to control and deploy page-based customizations from a GUI, workflow management that provides sound governance, and a content structure or UI layer that makes it possible to track and manage large numbers of site customizations.

6. Is web analytics vendor lock-in a thing of the past with tag management?

I'm going to have to say no. Tag management DOES significantly reduce web analytics vendor lock-in. Tag implementation is probably the biggest single barrier to changing solutions – so the impact is real. But there are a number of other friction points that don't go away. Collection design is actually somewhat different on different systems – so there is design and implementation work to be done even with a TMS in place. And, of course, things like training, reporting, data feeds, APIs, etc., all introduce significant friction. I think it's fair to say that tagging is the one major difference between web analytics and other types of enterprise software when it comes to friction and vendor lock-in. But vendor lock-in exists in pretty much every single type of enterprise software.

7. Semphonic has grown tremendously. What are your plans for the future?

I wish I knew! Seriously, one of the hardest things in our industry is the pace of technology change. It puts a lot of pressure on consulting companies to constantly adapt. Going back to my first answer, I'm pleased with the increasing level of maturity in our industry. It's creating real demand for customer analytics that actually drive the business. It's funny to say, but we're really starting to do the kind of analysis we hoped to do when we began the business 14 years ago. Digital is just catching up with the types of statistical, modeling and customer analytics techniques we were using 10-20 years ago in database marketing. That's not because we somehow forgot the techniques – it's because the infrastructure, platforms, richness of data, and customer maturity just weren't there. Tag Management Systems are a big part of reaching that level of maturity – a level where implementation is a small part of your analytics program – not the whole enchilada.

Webtrends, Inc., the global leader in unified mobile, social and web analytics and engagement, today announced that it will begin offering turnkey web analytics integration through a new partnership with Tealium, the leader in enterprise tag management.

Through the partnership, announced in conjunction with eMetrics San Francisco, Webtrends will be able to deploy its leading web analytics solution on any site within minutes via a single line of code, giving organizations unprecedented flexibility in choosing the solution that best fits their digital marketing needs.

In previous years, implementing web analytics solutions was considered a costly chore because of the work associated with installing new code and customizing it based on business requirements. Through Tealium, Webtrends can deliver an advanced implementation within minutes or hours.

Read the release …

Tealium today announced that it has joined the Web Analytics Association (WAA) as a corporate member for enterprise tag management. The announcement coincides with Tealium’s appearance at the WAA LA Symposium tomorrow, Jan. 18, in Santa Monica, Ca. Said WAA President Peter Sanborn: “Tag management is rapidly becoming an established best practice in our industry. On behalf of the WAA Board and members, we welcome Tealium to the association.”

For more information, read the full release.