What is our primary use case?
Tealium is generally used for tag management and its CDP capabilities. I've also used it as a consent manager for a very large project for HSBC. No CMP on the market could handle HSBC's very complicated scenarios. Within that project, we understood that the CDPs available on the market can't handle situations where you have subdomains owned by different entities and the main domain owned by different entities.
The conditions set up for each subdomain are different from each other. In terms of auditing capabilities, the CMPs claim that their scanning abilities are rock solid, which is absolutely not the case. Therefore, we have to build a custom solution based on Tealium's consent manager in combination with the Google Cloud Platform for a consent logging solution. We also used the observed point to run a quality assessment for the solution that was built.
With Tealium, I'm mainly focused on tag management and its CDP capabilities. For the CDP capabilities, I'm using it alongside a very large team. So, I'm the Telium SME for a team of 70 Telium specialists. We use it in a very complex scenario where Tealium works as the omnichannel campaign orchestrator.
All the data is passed through Tealium to capture the initial sets of data from various online and offline data sources and then send them to the reporting systems so that they can be analyzed from that point on. This connection happens on the server side.
What is most valuable?
I really enjoy Tealium as a whole, including its tag management part and its CDP capability. I'll break it down into two parts. Tealium is the only tool available on the market for tag management designed properly for enterprise users. It already has a lot of ready-made integrations that you can customize according to your needs. Tealium's system combines tags with the concept of extensions.
The way in which you can scope these extensions will allow you to greatly simplify your work when it comes to managing complex implementations. You could theoretically do the same things with Google tag manager. Generally, simple things are easier to do in Google Tag Manager. Very complicated things are done in a much easier, much smoother, and much more logical way Tealium compared to other tag management tools.
Tealium is a complex tool. Although it's advertised as a no-code platform, that is really not the case. If you use your tag management system at a high enough level, you cannot rely just on the ready-made integrations and the out-of-the-box features. The same thing applies to Google Tag Manager.
In many cases, you will also need to write code. However, Tealium allows you to deploy that code and control it throughout your implementation at a much more granular level, allowing you to do complicated things in a very streamlined fashion.
For the Tealium CDP part, the tool has many ready-made integrations, and the concept of Webhooks allows you to integrate with pretty much anything else. The available consent manager integrations also make sending consent values across your entire tech stack much easier. It's part of the same platform and designed to be easily integrated with most consent management platforms.
This consent integration feature is great for integration between your tag management and your CMP. You will still need to develop your own CMP or consent manager for extremely complicated scenarios. However, developing your own consent manager is much easier because Tealium has the consent manager API, which allows you to use a lot of ready-made functionality within your own code. The heavy lifting of that technical solution is handled through the API.
For that sort of work, you need a developer. You won't be able to use someone who just analyzes data. You need someone technical who understands the JavaScript behind it to deliver this solution. It will be much quicker for a developer to deliver this solution using Tealium's APIs rather than coding everything from scratch and doing DevOps work to build the infrastructure.
With Tealium, you can use your own infrastructure alongside Tealium's API. You need to write your own custom functionalities that you can integrate with Tealium's API capabilities.
What needs improvement?
Tealium provides documentation and great customer support. The solution's documentation could be vastly improved to make life easier for people using it on a regular basis. Many of the questions we asked the support team could have been avoided if Tealium had provided better documentation.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Tealium Customer Data Hub for around eight years, but on a very advanced level for the past six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I haven't faced any stability issues with the solution except for slowdowns and very short downtimes. However, these things happen on all the major platforms. The reality is that most customers don't use these platforms as much as they believe they are and don't check them as often as they probably should.
Therefore, they might be under the impression that a product like Google Analytics is always running smoothly. However, it has loads of issues, downtime, and times when it isn't processing large amounts of data. The same applies to Tealium. Compared to Google products, Tealium does a much better job of updating statuses and letting you know if certain regions are affected.
Many other platforms don't really allow you to control if your data passes through certain regional data centers. With Tealium, you will have information about downtime or platform-related infrastructure issues. They are generally done on a regional level, and Tealium does a good job of letting you know the status of resolution for those specific issues.
I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Tealium Customer Data Hub is a very, very scalable tool. Around 100 users use the solution in our organization. My team has 70 users, and other Tealium users are in other parts of the business.
I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's customer support is better than that of Google support services and Adobe. Tealium provides the best enterprise-level support that I've come across. The support team is very knowledgeable and generally very quick. It also depends on the relationship you build with the support team over the years. Tealium provides the top technical support you can get for an enterprise tool.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I work with Google Tag Manager and Adobe in parallel with Tealium Customer Data Hub. Certain clients have certain technical stack requirements, and we adjust to those requirements. It is fine if a client absolutely wants to use just Adobe products for their tech stack. In some cases, it makes sense because they have a particular need.
For Adobe Analytics, it makes sense to use Adobe Launch for tag management and other Adobe products. Clients also get bulk prices if they get the whole thing from a single vendor. Clients will always have commercial reasons to choose one tech stack over another.
We do tell them what we believe is better, and Tealium is definitely one of our favorite tools for CDP and tag management systems. However, Tealium is a tool for enterprise. You're probably better off with Google Tag Manager if you're running a small to medium organization. It's easier to use Google Tag Manager, and you don't have any running costs. With Tealium, the costs are significantly higher.
How was the initial setup?
The solution's initial setup is not straightforward. I wouldn't call Telium a straightforward tool because it has a steep learning curve. However, once you understand its concepts and if a technical person uses it, then you will really enjoy it. The learning curve with Google Tag Manager is much smoother, but it becomes extremely complicated when you start doing complicated things.
Tealium is generally a very stable tool. There are times when Tealium struggles with data processing, just like any other provider, including Google, Adobe, or Microsoft. However, it has a pretty good notification system and very good support that will sort out these infrastructure issues very quickly.
What was our ROI?
Tealium Customer Data Hub is definitely worth the money for a large-scale project or very large companies. If you have a very large company that does very complex e-commerce work, you will need a smaller team of Tealium specialists to do all the setups for you compared to Google Tag Manager.
However, if you have a small company like a corporate website, Tealium is not a great choice because it will be very expensive, and your needs are very basic. You shouldn't really have to pay Tealium specialists to manage your tags on that very simple website. You're only using very standard events and hardly any important customizations.
For very large projects, Tealium always has a positive return on investment. I've never seen any companies looking to switch over from Tealium. They have considered other alternatives but quickly concluded that it's not worth switching. Those who start using Tealium will generally stay with Telium because there is no better tool for enterprise-level customers.
Tealium is very, very scalable and designed with enterprise in mind. You have, by default, multiple environments. You divide your environments into testing and production. That is done out of the box, and you have capabilities that will help you test your setups between websites.
Let's assume you have a Tealium profile on one website. You can pull your configuration from one of your other websites and test it on that website. You can do an analysis to understand how your setup behaves on a different data layer.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Tealium Customer Data Hub is an expensive solution, but it is not more expensive than Adobe. For Adobe, if you want to get Google Analytics, you might be much better off. I have several situations in mind where using Tealium for server-side data collection was much cheaper. Users could hold that data in BigQuery as a data warehouse and use Google Looker to visualize the data.
A company saved approximately eight million dollars over five years just by doing that. They took the most important reports from Adobe Analytics that older users were counting on. They replicated them in Google Looker and saved eight million over five years.
They had quite a large initial setup cost. However, since they didn't have to pay the very, very high cost for Adobe Analytics, they could get the data they were looking for at a much lower cost in the medium term.
What other advice do I have?
I'm a customer of the solution, but the company I work for also has a partnership with Tealium. We use the solution for our company's day-to-day uses, and our company does implementations for healthcare companies like AstraZeneca and GSK.
I also wrote the code for GSK's consent manager. It wasn't nearly as complicated as what needed to be done for HSBC. Still, they prefer using the consent manager from Tealium rather than the CMP. They could have used the CMP if they wanted to, but they wanted to use Tealium for it.
Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.