The Future of Tag Management: Improving Speed, Security & Privacy

Mammoth Growth: Insights From The Trenches

In this latest episode of our podcast, Mammoth Growth EMEA President Stuart Scott chats with Yair Dovrat, Founder of Zaraz, a lightweight tool which makes any website 40% faster with a single line of code.

Yair shares how Zaraz began, explaining how they identified the problem of data accuracy in web analytics and decided to automate the solution. He and his co-founder Yo'av Moshe initially built a QA software for web analytics and third-party tools, but when they joined Y Combinator in the Winter of 2020, they faced challenges in selling it. Through customer feedback and coaching from YC’s then-managing partner Michael Seibel, Yair and Yo’av realized the need for better management and visibility of third-party tools on websites, and that’s when inspiration struck them.

When Yair and Yo’av were considering what they wanted to do next with Zaraz, they saw an emerging trifecta that they could address:

1. In late 2020, Google announced their plans to rank websites based on their core web vitals like page load speed.
2. At the same time, Google floated the idea of penalizing slow websites by, for example, displaying a warning banner when you loaded the page. Though this latter action never came to pass, both of these points made marketers, web developers, and backend engineers eager for ways to quickly improve their core web metrics.
3. Meanwhile Google Tag Manager and tools like Segment were making it easier and easier to add more tools to your tech stack with less coding, there was no solution available to offload this growing proliferation of third-party pixels.

Yair and Yo’av realized they position Zaraz as an alternative to Google Tag Manager, one that would be faster, more secure, and privacy-safe. By pivoting the value of Zaraz in this way, they positioned the company to be acquired by Cloudflare in December of 2021.

Zaraz works by loading a website’s third-party tools in the backend instead of in the browser. Since users can customize Zaraz to only pass the data they absolutely need from Google Ads and other third-party pixels, sites can easily reduce security risks by minimizing their surface area to outside attacks.

Towards the end of their conversation, Yair shares with Stuart the importance of standardizing tracking implementation, and the adoption of common APIs to ensure data consistency and trust. Yair concludes by sharing some of his future plans for Zaraz, including privacy-related features, data loss prevention, and expanding the capabilities of managed components in the years to come.

Thanks for listening!
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Since 2015, over 850 companies have trusted Mammoth Growth to surpass their marketing, product, and business intelligence goals. We offer consulting, integration, and strategic planning services in the following areas:
- Data Engineering / Governance
- BI Reporting & Dashboarding
- Customer Data Platform (CDP)
- Product & Behavioral Analytics
- Lifecycle / Email Marketing
- Modern Data Pipelines
- Multi-Touch Attribution
- Machine Learning
- A/B Testing
Mammoth Growth has deep expertise in a wide range of tools, including Amplitude, Braze, Heap, Mixpanel, Optimizely, Rudderstack, and Segment.
We’re your Growth Team as a Service.