Ensighten Manage is a popular tag management system used globally, promising to increase page loading speed, accelerate tag deployment, and facilitate omnichannel 1:1 customer engagement across platforms and devices. Ensighten provides tag control by visitor, session, and page, and harmonizes data collection.
The company’s Tag Delivery Network serves billions of tags annually for familiar brands like Sony, Staples, Symantec, T-Mobile, and United Airlines.
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Twilio Segment
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
Ensighten manage can be setup to be used by non technical business users. However the product provides a lot of flexibility by the way of custom custom Javascript and HTML tags, and advanced features like events, which needs coding experience as well as understanding of web technologies. Ensighten mobile is also a promising tool, but so far we have not had any luck setting it up, mainly due to challenges with Android setup
Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application
Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.
While the code templates that are already existent provide an easy interface to leverage existing code sets, custom codes still need to be written a lot of times since the templatized versions apply them to a global scope only and not for individual URLs or regex's for specific use cases for pixel vendors. Also, the library needs to be updated more frequently with new pixel vendors injecting their own variations of codes
Professional services (both the shared and dedicated model) definitely needs a lot of improvement since this is something that we have been immensely challenged with as a client of Ensighten in general. General response times and availability of support hours both from an account management standpoint and professional services/support standpoint have been quite challenging in the past year or two and there has been no real progress on this front
Ensighten Manage uses its own best practices to modify certain code sets from say JavaScript to Jquery for instance as it may be more compatible within its platform. This needs to change so that the tool is more nimble, agile and flexible in accepting and executing on different vendor codes
More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.
For the volume of tracking pixels that we plan to implement it only makes sense for us to continue. At this point, development is benefiting significantly from not being bogged down with writing tracking pixel code and the marketing team(s) enjoy being able to stay connected to their tool deployments. As the portfolio of tracking methods increases, the usage of Ensighten will increase with it.
The GUI looks professional and is overall very usable. Menu and buttons are laid out well and easy to view. Wizard-like tag configuration is pleasant. Color scheme is pleasant to view, lacking fatiguing colors. Page load progress indicator is reassuring. Filters on past-visited screens are remembered, very handy. Filter options are flexible.
The Ensighten Manage support team has been helpful and dedicated to assisting us solve problems that come up with tag deployments even when the issues are completely unrelated to the core Manage product itself. They seem to have the right mix of tag-specific subject matter experts and general support resources.
Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.
Ensighten is a great tool, and as good as any in the industry with strong workflow capabilities, an admin API and a friendly interface. It does have some limitations and is not entirely "marketer friendly" as they claim. Also, note we've experienced some performance/load time issues with the Ensighten data layer, which we are addressing with them.
We've used Ensighten Tag Management since 2013 - before this, we used Adobe's out of the box dynamic tagging solution. Since Ensighten is a purpose-built tool, it provides a great deal more flexibility than that of Adobe. Rule-drived spaces and conditions were not available in Adobe's tag container. Ensighten's visual tagger is unique in its ability to place MBOXes on the page for A/B testing. Finally, mobile tagging is simply not possible without going through the release process, which Ensighten has freed us from
I'm not sure these are "official competitors" (or alternatives) to Segment, but we use them in parallel for different goals. We use Datadog for logging and monitoring and we use Mixpanel to perform data analysis based on the data we gather using Segment (and other sources). I don't think we ever evaluated any other service vs. Segment. I think we got a recommendation on Segment, liked it and decided to use it (and we're happy with it since).
Increased complexity when debugging so bug are taking longer to fix when they are related to Ensighten
Our sites are loading about 10 seconds faster and have opened our eyes as to how much javascript we are rendering onto our sites which is no longer needed.
Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.
