Ensighten, a U.S. startup allowing businesses to manage their own tags and track their data online, has released a new version of its Ensighten Mobile tool.
What’s handy about the newest iteration of Ensighten Mobile is that it doesn’t require a user to tweak a mobile app using a software development kit (SDK), garnering it the name “no-SDK.”
This can be very helpful for marketers who want to be able to track different kinds of data through tags – for example, how many visitors are using a particular feature of their mobile app – but who don’t have the technical expertise to use an SDK to make changes. Using Ensighten Mobile, they can skip asking their developers to make adjustments, and can save time and effort by doing it themselves.
“With an SDK, you really have sort of a chicken and egg problem,” says Josh Manion, Ensighten’s founder and CEO. “If you were on the digital marketing side of the mobile app world, what you really had to do was you had to anticipate everything you’d possibly want to track, or any possible changes or areas you might want to optimize in that app before the application was actually built.”
The way Ensighten Mobile works is that it allows marketers to insert a single line of code into their mobile apps. Within 15 minutes, it then compiles a mobile app library and submits it to app marketplaces for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone 8. So when marketers do want to go in and make changes to a mobile app, they can do that basically immediately – making testing and optimization a lot faster.
Earlier this year, United Airlines’ marketing team used Ensighten Mobile to make a quick change to wording in its app. The mobile app had featured some incorrect wording about the company’s Mileage Plus membership, but marketers were able to quickly fix the text and then make the changes visible to all users right away, without requiring them to download an update.
“Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is empower the marketer who’s using these technologies … to do that without having to be a burden on their development resources, and to have a much more streamlined process where they don’t need to go through a big process of republishing their app,” Manion says.
He added the other advantage to using Ensighten is that marketers can use multiple SDKs from different vendors, instead of having to just stick to one or two – a common pain point for developers who have to push out an app.
For current customers, there is no direct extra charge to use Ensighten Mobile. However, with more customers using a mobile app, there may be more server requests, and Ensighten’s pricing is volume-based.
In January, Ensighten raised about $40 million in series B funding from investors in the Bay area. It also acquired a competitor, TagMan, for an undisclosed sum in March.