Performable is one of those startups that sounds cool, but who really understands what it does? Until recently, not that many people outside the Cambridge, MA-based marketing technology company.
To learn more, I met with David Cancel, Performable’s founder and CEO, at the startup’s cavernous new digs near Central Square. As he admits, marketing technology is a “non-sexy” topic that’s not easy for laypeople to grasp (or journalists to write about). But that has also allowed the startup to stay mostly under the radar while it has grown to about 15 employees and hundreds of corporate customers.
In a nutshell, Performable makes software that helps companies automate marketing processes and sharpen their marketing analytics down to the level of individuals and actions. That means—unlike Google Analytics, say, or other big players like IBM (with Unica and Coremetrics) or Adobe (Omniture)—Performable tries to provide information about how each consumer interacts with a given brand across different websites, social media, and devices.
It’s a much broader vision than the Web page testing tool that Performable was originally known for, though Cancel says that tool is still a significant part of the company’s revenue. (About a year ago, my colleague Wade wrote an in-depth story about the early days of Performable and its genesis based on Cancel’s previous experience at Compete, the online marketing firm that he co-founded.)
Performable sends customers a daily e-mail that reports activity and trends happening with their websites. Through a software-as-a-service model, customers install a Web analytics tool and a marketing content management system (which includes the landing-page testing tool). The software tracks and displays each interaction with each customer—with special attention to which Web pages, e-mails, or phone calls generate clicks and revenue—and provides specific recommendations for how to boost things like conversion rates and search-engine traffic.
The startup is part of a growing mini-cluster of marketing-related tech companies in
