The world of ‘tag management’ is not exactly a sexy one, but it’s vital for working out the stats and analytics around web sites. These days sites can be running hundreds of tags tracking advertising and pretty much everything you can think of. The problem is, if you open the hood it’s a mess in there, and nearly all of these tags are proprietary. So what if someone just open-sourced the tag management side of this but concentrated on building the more value-added products?
That’s exactly what a new startup, QuBit is doing. Launched out of stealth mode today by four ex-Googlers, QuBit is announcing OpenTag, its first product – the world’s first free open source Tag Management system.
With OpenTag, you simply install one tag and then get a dashboard at QuBit to manage all the other tags you have on the site, for free (for sites with less than a million page views), no contract needed. Graham Cooke, CEO of QuBit, calls it the “The tag to end all tags.”
This will be of some interest to existing players which charge, such as TagMan, Incitent, Helium and BrightTag. Some companies can charge up to £5,000 a month for tag management.
OpenTag’s high performance Container Tag reduces the number of different scripts running sequentially. The deployment of tags is also faster as it uses a global content delivery network to ensure tags are served at the lowest latency and the highest reliability. Crucially, for developers OpenTag also removes the problem of Tag Management out of the core development cycle, freeing up resources.
Of course, OpenTag is a sort of trojan horse (though not in a terribly bad way, unless you are a tag management company charging an arm and a leg). By open-sourcing the tag ecosystem, QuBit is now free to roll out other products in the realm of data-driven website optimisation products and solutions to conversion.
And they are already working with AOL, Expedia, Not on the High Street, Blackberry and TalkTalk.
QuBit is backed by Westminster North Capital with $1.3m in seed funding, and the company founders themselves, making this one of the few EMEA companies to come out of Google in Europe.