Contact: Scott Denne
Ensighten picks up TagMan to bring additional customers and technology to its offering for tag management, a space that’s seen little M&A activity. The deal brings Ensighten a smaller competitor, but one that does about two-thirds of its business in Europe, giving it an opportunity for international expansion. The combined company will have less than 200 people. Petsky Prunier advised TagMan on its sale.
Tag management vendors have been a tough sell – TagMan was on the market for about a year and Search Discovery’s Satellite technology, which sold to Adobe last summer, saw little interest from potential acquirers beyond Adobe. Most large marketing software firms have already built or bought tag management technology to go with their own apps and view tag management as a feature.
Ensighten, which just closed a $40m venture round in January, and competitors like Tealium and BrightTag aim to build tag management systems that make it easier for marketing products from different vendors to share data. The market for stand-alone tag management software is still nascent, likely less than $50m in annual sales. While big software companies are focused on selling their own applications, they’re unlikely to put a premium valuation on a platform that would enable customers to integrate marketing apps from competitors. Deals in this space will remain small for the foreseeable future.
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