Online shoppers are more distracted than ever. As the count of e-commerce and comparison shopping sites on the Internet expands daily, an e-retailer’s job of attracting and retaining customers becomes even more difficult. This fierce competition has left online retailers grappling with how to convince shoppers to buy at their site over their competitors’. Fortunately, there are strategies online retailers can use to reach their most valuable customers — and it all starts with using a resource all retailers have, but few understand: their own customer data.

For most retailers, the prospect of figuring out how to tap the stream of anonymous, but valuable, data shoppers leave behind is overwhelming. Most have difficulty making sense of the data, and most analytics teams are already overwhelmed with staying on top of site analytics alone…

To read the full editorial by TellApart CEO, Josh McFarland, please visit MediaPost 

We are honored to have been selected as a FASTech 50 company – a DowJones VentureWire list of top venture-backed start-ups sourced from thousands of nominations from Twitter and hundreds of start-ups in the Dow Jones VentureSource database. The Top 50 finalists were selected for “paving a unique path technologically.” And that’s exactly what we’re doing at TellApart by helping online retailers think about retargeting and their own customer data in a new, massively profitable way.

We were judged against the following criteria:

“Not only must [the companies] be U.S. based, privately owned with at least one venture capital firm as an investor, but they also must have a product or service on the market that launched no earlier than three years ago. Most importantly, the start-up’s innovation should break from conventional methods, introduce novel technology or markedly advance an existing product or service. “

As a result of our inclusion on the list, TellApart CEO Josh McFarland has been invited to speak at the VentureWire FASTech conference in November. We are in good company: Yammer, FlipBoard and a slew of other disruptive startups rounded out the list.   Congrats to the other winners!

Please get in touch if you’re a retailer that’d like to find out how TellApart can help your company pave a unique technological path and revive your display efforts with data-driven retargeting.

John Ebbert of AdExchanger gave his thoughts on why retargeting is so hot after reading what our CEO,  Josh McFarland, had to say about the importance of customer data in an article he wrote for E-commerce Times and CRM Buyer.  Josh maintains that all online retailers have the opportunity to run efficient, profitable display retargeting programs at scale thanks largely to data-focused technology companies (like TellApart) that can handle the ‘heavy lifting’.  This enables online retailers to run better display campaigns and ultimately allows them to focus on their businesses.  John agreed, adding that effective retargeting tactics are just starting to bud thanks to the new audience-driven marketplaces that allow e-commerce marketers to cherry pick ad impressions efficiently and reach only their most valuable prospects online.

In related news, it looks like e-commerce growth is on fire — and retargeting is fueling the fire.  According to comScore, e-commerce spending grew in Q2 of 2011 at its highest rate (14%) since Q4 of 2007.  Coincidence that retargeting is hot and e-commerce sales are growing at the highest rate in years?  Doubtful.

Our announcement last week of closing a $13M round of funding highlighted a current theme in online advertising: Display is thriving and data is the reason. We had great conversations with top tech and advertising journalists about our funding news, our technology, our unique business model and the rapid growth in the industry in general. What’s exciting for us is the chord our news struck with many of the reporters, especially around the idea of how data’s pumping new life into display advertising. It’s what we’ve been saying all along — customer data is a retailer’s most important (and likely underutilized) asset.

GigaOm published an article that highlights how display advertising is performing better than it ever has, highlighting our performance stats, and points to a recent eMarketer report that shows how some of the tech world’s biggest and brightest stars (Facebook, Microsoft, Google, others), are expected to grow their display ad businesses in 2011.

TechCrunch wrote about how TellApart’s technology is enabling new advertising alternatives for retailers and offering them low risk/high return business terms in the process.

Why the big change? Display advertising is no longer the misdirected spam of years past – it is now a precision marketing channel that can be directed at very specific targets. As an example of recent innovations in display, the article mentions how TellApart’s sophisticated technology allows retailers to collect and organize all of their customer data – and then make that data do the heavy lifting in their marketing efforts.   Data, specifically a retailer’s own customer data, is the fuel that is helping display advertising to perform at levels that seemed unthinkable just 2 years ago.

For more on the revitalization trends in display advertising, and TellApart’s key role in leading the way, read these articles from The New York Times and AllThingsD.

Clearly, as far as the future of display advertising goes, it’s all about the data. At TellApart, we’re helping retailers to use their own customer data and turn display advertising from a channel of diminishing returns into a significant profit driver of incremental revenues.

If you’re a retailer that’d like to catch up with the competition by harnessing the power of your own customer data, please drop us a line. We’d love to boost your incremental revenues by helping you “tell apart” your best prospects and customers from the rest.

It’s a big news day for us at TellApart:  this morning, we announced a $13 million round of financing led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Greylock Partners. The last time Bain and Greylock teamed up on an early stage investment? It was for a little company called DoubleClick, almost fourteen years ago to the day.

In addition to the funding, we’re also excited that Ajay Agarwal, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures, will join our Board of Directors. Ajay’s expertise and deep relationships in e-commerce will be a huge asset to our company.

Our latest round of funding will allow us to continue helping the world’s largest, most renowned retailers harness the power of their customer data to drive their online marketing efforts. Diapers.com, Hayneedle, drugstore.com, eBags, and dozens of others have all selected TellApart to manage their display ad retargeting.

Whether you are learning about us for the first time or have been following us since our launch, please reach out to see how we can help your company “tell apart” your best customers and prospects – and transform your online marketing capabilities in the process.

This financing also means we’re going to ramp our hiring even faster. If you are excited by e-commerce data and marketing, take a look at our Jobs page to learn more about our open positions – we’re hiring for almost every function!

Our full press release can be found here.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal mentioned us in an article featuring LUMA Partners’ diagram of the mind boggling number of companies that make up the display advertising market, or LUMAscape, as it’s been coined:

And while it’s nice to be noticed in this technicolor yawn of logos, we’d like to propose a diagram of our own:

We literally handle everything for our clients — data collection and refinement, ad creation and optimization, real-time bidding, impression buying, ad serving, reporting, analytics, you name it — all with no risk at a guaranteed ROI (new revenue) thanks to our unique pricing model.  

We only make money when they make money;  we get a share of the revenue generated when we can get a prospective buyer to click on a client’s display ad and then return to convert into an actual customer.  If you’re running an e-commerce business and that sounds interesting, contact us below!

Featured more prominently on the TellApart Engineering blog this morning, we’re happy to announce that Amazon has released a case study on TellApart’s unique technical architecture, built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a key partner of ours, enabling us to build an efficient, elastically scalable and fast technical infastructure.

In the end, it’s this technical proficiency that allows us to offer an unmatched business model with display ad retargeting. Retailers need not share any of the media risk inherent in buying millions of impressions (at 10,000 bid requests per second, no less!) Now, instead of worrying that these impressions won’t turn into sales, retailers can guarantee a transparent ROI from retargeting by working with TellApart.

To read the case study in greater detail, click here.

This morning David Sze was on CNBC discussing some of his investments over the past 10 years while at Greylock Partners. His portfolio is extremely impressive, including companies such as LinkedIn, Pandora & Facebook.

Towards the end of the interview he was prompted to name a Greylock company that might be the next big thing and called out TellApart as one of the most promising companies in the entire portfolio.

He goes on to explain why the next tech boom is very likely to be focused on the enterprise, with companies like TellApart helping large retailers leverage the power of cloud computing to grow their businesses.

To hear David discuss his enthusiasm for TellApart, start the video at around the 4:00 mark below. 

Recently MIT’s Technology Review published a comprehensive article about TellApart in their Business Impact section.  The theme of this section for the month of May is ‘understanding the customer’ – something that is at the core of what we do so well.

Mark Ayzenshtat, our CTO & co-founder,  discussed how our cloud-based platform can tell apart casual website visitors from those who are the most likely to buy and then address them with personalized ads across the web in real-time.  This activity brings potential customers back to our client’s websites with amazing effectiveness and ultimately leads to a massive amount of new revenue.  

The big lift in incremental sales we produce is not lost on Jeff Steeves, Director of Customer Acquisition for CSN Stores (and a great client of ours.) Jeff stated that CSN sees “significant lift to their conversion rate” thanks to TellApart – giving us credit for doing all of the ‘heavy lifting’ in this complicated process. Thanks, Jeff!

Link: Google Releases Case Study Heralding our Real-Time Bidding Proficiency

Last week we released a case study in conjunction with Google/DoubleClick.

The study primarily highlights:

• Our cutting-edge Customer Data platform
• The way in which our infrastructure leverages the speed & elasticity of the Cloud
• Our technical capabilities in real-time bidding (RTB) at massive scale. 

The study focuses on the integration of our data platform with DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange real-time bidding API, noting that we are one of the largest bidders in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

How does this translate to value for our clients? We ensure that each dollar spent on our client’s behalf has been optimized to yield maximum returns.

The fact that no other retargeting company can match our results is a credit to our engineering capabilities and differentiated business model. In summary, the case study shows that TellApart’s deep RTB integration with Doubleclick’s API is one of the key reasons why we can add from 3-8% to a retailer’s bottom line.