Ensighten’s tags open up data collection for IBM’s Marketing Cloud

The basic idea of IBM’s Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX)

For digital marketers who have invested in IBM’s Marketing Cloud and other vendors’ digital tools, Ensighten is now offering more flexibility.

The tag management firm has announced that its data collection mechanisms can now be used to provide data for IBM’s Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX), which is designed to exchange data between commonly used marketing platforms.

The cloud-based UBX is an exchange of individual behavioral data between systems, so that marketers don’t need to contact IT to integrate, say, mobile marketing platform Vibes, social media marketing platform Shoutlet and IBM’s Marketing Cloud.

One problem with UBX, though, is that it only has about 30 integrations, each one of which is quite involved. On the other hand, Ensighten’s Manage tag management solution, which involves some JavaScript in a website header, can capture data from any website and allow it to be processed by more than 1,100 integrated vendors — including data management platform BlueKai, retargeter Criteo or community review platform BazaarVoice — and then sent to the Marketing Cloud.

Ensighten CEO Josh Manion gave me a possible use case where a marketer already sends her website data to Adobe Analytics. But Adobe’s tool is not integrated with UBX, so Ensighten allows her to pipe website data directly to UBX and thence to IBM’s Marketing Cloud tools.

Alternatively, she could have used an IBM site data collection tool, like Digital Analytics. But that would have meant abandoning her investment in the popular Adobe Analytics. Also, she can now send website data that has been processed by, say, Criteo to UBX. Similarly, Ensighten Pulse and Mobile gathers data from mobile devices, digital ads, kiosks and the Internet of Things for UBX.

Once the data reaches the Marketing Cloud, it can be used for such tasks as personalization or profile creation.

“UBX is robust and can accommodate many integrations,” Ensighten VP of Marketing Erik Bratt told me via email, “but each one has to be built by the vendor and integrated with IBM as a single connection.”

By working with Ensighten, he said, IBM has “just opened up their marketing cloud in a big way.”

“This is something the other marketing clouds have not done,” he added. “While the others have their limited tag managers, none have integrated with a full enterprise [tag management system] in this way.”