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.

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and have been following us from afar (as a potential client or candidate), we’d love for you you to come meet us in person at one of our upcoming local events:

First up, our CTO, Mark Ayzenshtat, is speaking to UC Berkeley students on a panel alongside industry luminaries including Vivek Wadhwa and Glenn Kelman.  TellApart is also sponsoring the UCB Startup Job Fair the following day, and we’re hiring like crazy, so be sure to stop by with your resume!

Industry Panel and Entrepreneurship Mixer
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 — 5:30-7:30p
UC Berkeley – Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium

And our CEO, Josh McFarland, will be speaking on the topics of big data and analytics at two upcoming events:

SDForum presents Analytics: The Next Wave
Friday, March 25, 2011
Stanford University – Tressider Union, Oak Lounge

How do businesses transform the wow of analytics and big data into the bottom line? The focus has shifted from using analytics for better data access and reporting to using insights collected from analytics to deliver better outcomes to the bottom line and drive high performance. This one-day conference will explore increasing the bottom line through new sources of data and uses, new deployment and data architecture models, and consumer targeting derived from big data intelligence.

Data 2.0 Conference
Monday, April 4, 2011
Mission Bay Conference Center – Robertson Auditorium

Within the past 10 years, the amount of data we can access online has grown exponentially. Whether open government data, social data, or business data as a service, everyone from startups to Fortune 500 corporations are discovering their role in the data supply chain and rethinking what business models are possible with data. What new types of companies will emerge that utilize newly accessible data? Will online structured data end up becoming centralized in services like Google or decentralized between 3rd parties? How do you fit into the data ecosystem, and how will the data ecosystem change in the next year?

Last week at the paidContent 2011 conference, TellApart CEO Josh McFarland, spoke to a packed audience at The TimesCenter in New York alongside industry leaders Randall Rothenberg (Chairman, IAB), Mike Walrath (Founder, RightMedia), and Vivek Shah (CEO, Ziff Davis).

Josh’s comments begin at the 20:00 mark, with an explanation of how online display advertising has entered its third phase change, from placement to content and now to a primary focus on the user (or audience).  The entire discussion is quite engaging, with a recurring theme addressing how publishers need to adopt the same techniques as advertisers to manage and fully utilize their data.  Video below:

We hosted a fantastic Shop.org regional dinner last night in San Francisco at Farrallon that included a neat (pun intended!) scotch tasting contest to see who among the crowd could “tell apart” the highest caliber spirits from the rest.  It was a well-attended event with really rich conversations among the retailers, especially around the topic of how to make retargeting work for the bottom line.

In preparation for exactly that discussion, we created a quick guide titled, “Five Tips for Driving Serious Revenue via Retargeting.” We’ve reprinted the tips below because we believe any retailer can use these helpful ideas to align their retargeting metrics with actual bottom line success.

1. Focus Solely on Measuring Click-to-Conversions
   Most ad networks and retargeting vendors will try to sell you campaigns based on CPMs, view-through conversions or clicks.  Yet your objective is to drive more conversions.  Make your vendor commit to a fixed cost-per-click-conversion metric to ensure your interests are aligned.  Ideally, pay only upon conversion.  This will ensure maximum return with minimal risk.
   
   
2. Use Dynamically Personalized Ads
   Showing each user the exact products they were most interested in will improve the click-through rates of your ads by up to 10x.  Ensure your vendor is continuously testing and optimizing new creative units.  This will yield the highest volume of users who return to your site and drive new conversions.
   
   
3. Don’t get Scammed by View-Through Conversions 
   View-through conversions have been used to overcharge retailers since the invention of display advertising.  To correctly measure their value, use a rigorous A:B testing framework to compare the conversion rates of those users who see ads to a control group whose ads are withheld.  This will help you compute your true ROI, which should be used to fund more click-conversions.
   
   
4. Keep 3rd Party Tags from Slowing Down Your Site
   Third party JavaScript tags can slow down your site and hurt your revenue.  Demand to know the number of pixels being dropped by the vendor’s tags, the number of network calls the tags are making and that the tags are asynchronous (i.e. they must load only after your own content is complete.)  This will ensure your site remains a high quality experience for your users.
   
   
5. Respect your Customers
   Retargeting vendors often try to maximize their revenue by serving as many ads as possible, annoying your users and making them feel “stalked.”  Make sure your vendor is showing as few ads as are necessary to drive new sales.  And offer users a simple way to opt-out, ideally within the ad unit itself.  This will help keep your users happy and loyal.

If you’re a member of Shop.org and in the Columbus, OH area, we’d love to see you at the next dinner we’re hosting on April 12, 2011 from 5:30-9:30pm at Rigsby’s Kitchen.

At eTail West last week, we presented a challenge to our booth guests: can you tell apart a pair of one carat diamond earrings (E color, VS1 clarity) from four high quality cubic zirconia pairs?

This turned out to be a pretty difficult test. Of the roughly 400 entrants, only 66 were able to pick out the real pair.  We would have expected 80 correct guesses if people were just guessing randomly!  We drew a lucky business card out of the correct-guess pile and gave away the $4,000 pair of earrings to a very surprised, very elated winner.

The ability to tell apart real diamonds is a skill that takes time to master. Thankfully we make it much easier to choose the right display ad retargeting partner for online retailers.

TellApart outperforms every other retargeting provider and does so with a pricing model that is risk free: we are the only company offering true click-to-click conversion CPA pricing for retargeting. No view-through conversion scams, no PPC click fraud. We only make money if you make money. It’s as simple as that.

We can make display ads work as well as paid search marketing thanks to our ex-Google engineering team, our machine-learning algorithms, our massive audience reach, and because we help you use the most powerful asset of all: your own customer data.

Stay in touch by following us on Twitter to see what we come up with for our next conference: Internet Retailer in San Diego, from June 14-17th.

On Wednesday evening, our founders, Josh and Mark, will be presenting TellApart’s business model and technology to an audience of a few hundred attendees. But you don’t have to schlep down to Palo Alto to see it, you can stream it live to your laptop!

The link to watch the event live is here and for those of you native to the area, the link to attend in person is here.  We’ll also be tweeting in real-time from @tellapart.

Update:  We took the runner-up spot, second only to M-Dot Networks, whom we congratulate for being keen competitors!  All in, it was a fun challenge and the validation of TellApart’s architecture by Amazon’s top AWS executives was alone worth the effort.  Oh, and knocking $10k off our next AWS bill isn’t bad either!

The full video of the evening’s presentations can be found at the link below, with TellApart’s appearance around 56:30.