An Interview with Josh Manion, the Founder and CEO of Ensighten

Josh Manion is the Founder and CEO of Ensighten, a new company that is bringing a lot of attention to the tag management space. In 2002 Josh started Stratigent and built the firm into one of the top web analytics consulting companies in the country.1. When you were running Stratigent, obviously a lot of your work was related to implementing or re-implementing web analytics solutions. At what point did you start to think about developing a tag management solution?At Stratigent this was a problem for almost every one of our clients and has been for a number of years. In early 2009 I decided that this was a problem that had be solved in a fundamentally different way then what was currently available and at this point was when I began the process of creating the Ensighten technology with a small team at Stratigent which quickly was broken out into its own company. The key was to create a technology that eliminates the need for IT /Developer involvement in the tagging process without limiting any of the functionality of the tools that are being managed by the system.2. I think that most people understand the concept of tag management but most people probably don't understand the difference between the products and solutions that are available. What makes Ensighten different than some of the other solutions that have been around for a couple of years now?There have been a number of approaches to solving the tag management issues over the years, what I think really makes Ensighten stand out is the following:

1. Ability to conduct deep conditional logic within pages and applications which results in the elimination of IT / Developer resources to support the tagging process.
2. The ability to manage web 1.0, web 2.0, flash, mobile, and social media applications for all vendors within one application.
3. Enterprise scalability
4. Speed / ease of deployment.
5. Frictionless privacy/data policy (e.g. we do not collect or store any of our clients customer data).

3. How does Ensighten deal with the code from multiple vendors (site analytics, digital research, ad serving, VOC, etc.)? From the beginning of Ensighten it was critical to me that Ensighten was able to deploy and manage any vendor that has a tag without needing to modify that vendor in anyway. This provides us the ability to support all current vendors with tags and give our clients the confidence that we will be able to support any future tag based vendors without the need to do custom development to support whatever vendors they want to deploy or manage.4. How does Ensighten deal with some of the more complicated implementation issues like video or mobile measurement?One of the biggest advantages of Ensighten is how we deal with tracking applications like flash application or mobile applications. With Ensighten you only need to include our library with a simple call at the top level of the application and then you can configure and update the tagging or what data you are collecting at any time without the need to ever get the developers involved and recompile or modify the application again. Our patented approach is completely different from how everybody else is going after this which normally requires you to pull apart all of the source code of the application and find the objects or event you want to track and write custom code to capture each event and send that to your analytics application. See the image below for more on how this process works.http://www.ensighten.com/ensighten-manage/flash-flex-air5. How long does it take to deploy Ensighten? What does the implementation process look like for the implementation solution?Ensighten implements extremely quickly and only requires our clients to insert a single line of code into the header of their websites. This normally only takes a few min to accomplish for a single site but for some large enterprises we have found this process make a take a few days to get onto all of their sites and applications.6. What was with the deal with the wigs at eMetrics??The wigs were our attempt to shine the spotlight on what an inefficient and tyranny filled process manually managing and implementing tagging technologies is and we thought that Washington DC would be the perfect place for us to stage a Tagoultion and declare our independence from manual tagging. Also, it was good fun to give away a few Ipads and see Jim Stern wearing the wig ( www.facebook.com/ensighten ).Thankfully, business at Stratigent seems to be as strong as ever. Be honest… On a scale of 1-10 how would you rate Bill Bruno so far as the President of Stratigent?Bill is doing a great job leading Stratigent and has been growing the company considerably since stepping into his new role. On your scale I would have to say 11.