Monetate Raises $8M To Help Companies Target Online Customers
Monetate has raised $8 million for its platform that helps companies such as Best Buy increase their sales through the analysis of information from multiple sources such as interactions with the web site, email data and search engine information. The Series C round brings the company’s total funding to $43 million. Existing investors OpenView Venture Partners, Common Fund and Lead Edge Capital participated in the round.
The service is designed to sit on top of a company’s infrastructure. Customers add to the header of their sites a JavaScript tag, which combines data from a user’s visit with other data sources to create a more detailed profile. This data is then used to deliver a personalized experience. Using the Monetate dashboard, for example, users can target customers from particular regions. Real-time weather data and other data then gets pulled in, giving a retailer the ability to offer hiking boots if the weather is expected to be decent over the weekend.
Threadless, the community site that makes, supports and buys art, has used Monetate to improve the experience of using its outdated mobile site. After getting a baseline on the quality of the site, they used Monetate to begin targeting customers.
Monetate is a cloud service, more well-suited to larger customers. On TrustRadius one customer writes:
Great software + good Monetate team both on client services, and within sales department. The Monetate user conference was also helpful to understand how other clients are using software – plus, best practice. The software is more expensive than basic packages (such as Visual Website Optimizer) and provides a more full service experience, which probably applies better to mid-size companies. For start-ups with the tech resources already available, would recommend using more basic package than full service experience.
Monetate also competes with Adobe, WebTrends, SiteSpect and Optimizely.
Physical retailers need more sophisticated ways to target customers across multiple channels. There’s a big market there but the challenges will increasingly come from data analytics providers that can offer APIs to pull data and make recommendations at a level of sophistication compared to Amazon.com.