Tealium, Splunk To Integrate Big Data, Tag Management

Tealium, a provider of enterprise tag management solutions and services, recently announced the integration of its digital data solution and tag management software with Splunk Enterprise.

Tealium’s solution expands Splunk Enterprise to enable users to gather more than just server-side machine data to now collect client-side visitor interaction data directly from websites, mobile web and native mobile apps to capture insights and behaviours for a complete 360-degree view of customer interactions.

Integration

Tealium enables users with no software coding experience to deploy and manage the third-party vendor tags – code snippets – required to gather and transfer specific digital data points. With Tealium DataCloud, the company’s enterprise data platform, users can correlate and combine those data points into an actionable source. To enable the integration, users simply click on the Splunk logo in the Tealium setup process, add the requested information and hit publish – the data is then streamed to Splunk without ever touching the website.

“It is impossible for nearly any organisation to be successful in the digital world today without properly leveraging their online customer interaction data,” said Jeff Lunsford, chief executive of Tealium, in a statement. “Splunk is a ground-breaking company that has helped make data very accessible and we’re proud to work alongside them to facilitate that process even further.”

In an interview with eWEEK, Lunsford said Splunk approached Tealium about six months ago about engaging in a partnership. “Splunk helps you visualise big data – on the server side,” he said. “They want to expand their data footprint so they can shine a light on client-side data.”

Adam Corey, director of business development at Tealium, told eWEEK, “The way we manage the tags is when we’re on a customer’s website we have a master set of all their data elements. With Splunk, we’re taking that data and saving it to a file so we can take any of those data elements that exist just as if it’s any other data on Splunk. We allow the customer to define what data they want into Splunk.”

Lunsford did a quick assessment of the eWEEK website and found 23 tags on the site, noting that each tag had its own different types of variables, which is inefficient for marketers. Tealium’s tag management platform helps to alleviate that issue, he said.

Client-side, browser data

“The world of big data gets more exciting everyday with new developments and capabilities that allow our customers to truly understand who their users are and what they really want,” said James Kernan, chief executive of KWCG, a national technology consulting company, in a statement. “Our mission is to always be on the forefront of innovation, and this new technology integration between Splunk and Tealium gives us the tools to provide superior insight into the customer journey.”

“The ability to capture client-side and browser data adds a new dimension to the information and insights companies can achieve,” said Bill Gaylord, senior vice president of business development at Splunk, in a statement. “Understanding which product features or attributes are driving higher user engagement leads to a better understanding of customer behaviour. Having the client server-side data available in Splunk allows companies to make this information available to and actionable by a much broader group within their organisations. Additionally, collecting data from various tags via Tealium in Splunk Enterprise provides comprehensive and unique insights that were not possible before. This integration reinforces the notion that the more data people put into Splunk, the more value they get out.”

In a blog post, Corey said that starting on 25 July, customers will be able to stream every data point collected through Tealium’s universal data object directly to Splunk Enterprise for ad-hoc analysis.

“This means that every data source defined on your website, mobile website or mobile application can be more deeply explored and better understood using Splunk’s robust ad-hoc segmentation and querying capabilities,” Corey said. “For marketers and analysts, this provides a solid foundation to more clearly and thoroughly understand customer behavior and experience. For technical users, this integration connects website-side user behavior with operational and server performance data providing a true 360-degree view of all user actions.”

Corey further explained: “Tealium’s universal data object is essentially the superset of all data collected across any digital channel. On the web, this can be page metadata, query string parameters, JavaScript variables or cookie values. In mobile applications, this can be any string, variable or action that you make available to Tealium for data collection. Each of these data points can provide insight into a user’s experience on the site – what products were viewed or what campaigns brought a user to the site. Once defined and indexed in Splunk, the analytical possibilities are endless.”

Tealium’s analytics background

Lunsford, who joined Tealium as chief executive in January 2013, said the company was founded in 2008 by two former executives at WebSideStory, a pioneering SaaS-based web analytics provider that is now part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, via acquisitions by Omniture and Adobe Systems. At WebSideStory, Tealium co-founders Ali Behnam and Mike Anderson oversaw optimisation consulting and web analytics implementations for major brands worldwide, giving them first-hand insight and experience into the issues surrounding the implementation of JavaScript tag-based online marketing solutions. Lunsford served as chief executive of WebSideStory and led its IPO in 2004.

“We put a JavaScript tag on customers’ websites so we could deliver real-time data to customers about what was happening on their websites,” he said. Soon that caught on and to stay ahead of the curve, the team developed a tag management platform based on the concept of universal tags, he said.

Now Tealium is “the data plane for your digital presence – to expose your data to everybody and anybody,” Lunsford said. “Tealium solves marketing’s big data problem at its source.”

Lunsford said this partnership with Splunk is a harbinger of things to come with Tealium. “You’ll see us down the road working with other big data guys,” he said.

Meanwhile, Splunk and Tealium are participating in a variety of joint events and activities throughout the year to ensure users get the most out of the new capabilities from the combined technologies. The first of these events kicked off in June when Splunk General Manager and Vice President of EMEA James Murray spoke on a panel at Digital Velocity Europe, Tealium’s annual European user conference in London. Tealium will also exhibit at .conf 2013, the fourth annual Splunk Worldwide Users’ Conference taking place from 30 September to 3 October, 2013, in Las Vegas.

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Originally published on eWeek.

Originally published on eWeek.