As an estimated 2,000 online retailers gather in Palm Desert, CA, today for the eTail West Conference, San Diego’s Anametrix says it’s introducing a new mobile app to give its corporate clients mobile access to cloud-based analytics data about their customers.
The Anametrix Mobile App, available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry platforms, is intended to give digital marketing executives an additional tool for getting to the big data that is the real focus of the company’s technology. As Anametrix CEO Pelin Thorogood told me recently, “We are all about selling to marketers.” She sees their target customer as the chief marketing officer of a global 2000 corporation who is focused on its consumer business.
Anametrix provides its software analytics as a service, enabling digital marketers to better understand what factors are contributing to sales conversions, and to optimize marketing strategies by testing various ways to get consumers to push the button.
Former WebSideStory founder Blaise Barrelet started Anametrix three years ago, acquiring analytics technology that former WebSideStory system architect Anders Olsson developed to take a more integrated approach to analytics services. The startup raised $4.4 million in October from TVC Capital, a San Diego private equity firm. TechCrunch reported at the time that Anametrix had previously raised $2.3 million from Barrelet’s Analytics Ventures, Airtek Capital Group, WMAS Management Group, and Alain Schreiber.
Thorogood, a marketing and analytics strategist who also worked at WebSideStory, succeeded Barrelet as CEO at the beginning of the year. She says the company has been generating revenue from a variety of media, retail, and automotive customers, including Condé Nast, the UC San Diego Health System, and one of the big three U.S. automakers, Thorogood says.
Thorogood says the question that digital marketing executives are asking is whether the money they are spending on marketing campaigns results in actual sales—whether they are spending their dollars on traditional TV and print advertising, or on Web, social media, e-mail, and other digital marketing channels.
It’s not a question that can be answered solely by Web analytics or some other specialized analytics technology, because consumers often use different channels to “shop” before they buy. “There are so many touch points for consumers now,” Thorogood says. “There is no longer a straight line to making a purchase.”
Anametrix is focusing its technology on the trail of digital “breadcrumbs” that consumers leave in different channels, which consist of recommendations, shares, “likes,” Web searches, e-mail, and mobile geo-location data.
What the industry is missing, Thorogood says, “is a holistic view of consumers across all these different
