Tealium, the tag management solution provider, has been working hard over the last few months to help "move the needle" and evolve the rapidly growing tag management space with a slew of new additions to its core product, including mobile tagging, the Tealium DataCloud and a new multi-CDN architecture.
Going Mobile
The first of these initiatives were the company's new mobile tagging capabilities that were released last November. While the company now enables marketers to manage tags on mobile websites, which work in much the same way as they do on traditional websites, the bigger initiative is the inclusion of a mobile application tagging option that allows marketers to better manage their marketing solutions and analytics without ever having to recertify their apps. All they have to do is implement the Tealium iQ tag management solution into the app.
Mobile app tagging presents users with support for the "most popular" native environments, including iOS and Android, as well as conditional tag loading that allows them to control which tags will load on specific screens within the app and event-based tracking that deploys tracking links and other events in the app. And as a nice bonus, Tealium's customers never have to bother updating Tealium iQ once it is integrated into the application.
Big Solution to Big Data
Since then, the company has launched the Tealium DataCloud, a new add-on service that will extend the value of Tealium's tag management capabilities. To do this, the DataCloud will make it easier for digital marketers to manage the exchange of data between third-party vendors by giving them a raw feed of their rich data stored in a centralized location.
This helps marketers uncover what Tealium CEO Jeff Lunsford called the "Holy Grail" of big data, which is "to have one common database with all of their customer information," making this solution ideal for companies with multiple locations and/or properties. So, with the DataCloud, Tealium customers will be able to create powerful, visitor-level profiles that will ultimately help improve their customer acquisition campaigns.
But that's not all that the DataCloud does; it also adds the ability to handle non-JavaScript tagging environments (i.e. Google Checkout) that don't accept the JavaScript tags that many vendors use. In other words, companies can now deploy mission-critical third-party tags across their entire ecommerce environments, whether they support JavaScript or not.
All of the data gathered by the Tealium DataCloud can be imported into various big data platforms, business intelligence platforms or third-party reporting tools, including AgilOne, Anametrix, Tableau Software and Quantivo.
Reinforcing the Foundations of CDN Architecture
Finally, Tealium's other big announcement was its move to a new multi-CDN (or content delivery network) architecture to provide its customers with optimal performance, thus making Tealium the fastest tag management delivery network currently available.
This new CDN architecture contrasts Tealium's old single-CDN approach through Limelight Networks. The main reason for making the change was to better service its clients' tags to vendors around the world by increasing their speed and redundancy rates. To do this, they've started to use CDNs from Akamai Networks and Edgecast Networks.
The performance of each Tealium CDN will be monitored across 30 global regions every 10 minutes to show the best and most up-to-date performing networks. Already, this new approach as been able to shave approximately 100 milliseconds off of the company's CDN performance, a number that Lunsford says shows a "very noticeable difference" for its customers, improving ecommerce conversion rates and time-on-site and page view metrics for content providers.
The Next Big Thing
Tag management is being heralded by some as the next big thing in digital marketing, and it has certainly proven to be a useful tool for those marketers that have already embraced it. With these new improvements, Tealium is sure to help take the industry to the next level. Will this be enough to convert new customers?