Monetate raises $15 million for a marketers' dream

Test, target, personalize and analyze: this startup provides a path to making your site efficient

Monetate, provider of testing, targeting, and personalization solutions for websites, announced Thursday that it has raised a $15 million Series B round of funding led by OpenView Venture Partners.

Citing research from Forrester that only a quarter of marketers actually test content on their site, Monetate wants to change that. The company provides easily implementable A/B and multivariate testing, so website owners can see exactly what is having a positive effect on clickthroughs, sales or whatever they’d like to measure.

Beyond testing, Monetate gives its customers advanced (geographic, weather (!), behavioral and demographic) targeting tools, personalization to make sites more revelant for users and, of course, analytics. Track conversion rate, average order value, revenue per session and other metrics on the fly.

“At Monetate our growth is fueled by the fact that we make it easy for marketers to change anything, anywhere on the website, for any customer, without having to go through IT,” said Monetate founder and CEO David Brussin.

The idea is to avoid back-end upgrades or site overhauls with simple copy-and-paste JavaScript snippets, letting Monetate handle the majority of the workload. It’s powerful testing and analytics with an easy road to implementation, so if it does what it says, it should be a marketer’s dream.

"We see Monetate as the 'third leg of the stool' for online marketers, alongside search and email,” said Adam Marcus, managing director of OpenView Venture Partners,” driving substantial incremental revenue for clients through website optimization that is directly under the control of marketing.”

Clients that Monetate has helped this year include the likes of Brookstore, GSI Commerce, L’Occitane, PETCO, QVC, The Sports Authority and Urban Outfitters.

Monetate, founded in 2008 and headquartered in Conshohocken, Penn. (greater Philadelphia area), previously raised a Series A financing of $5.1 million in 2010 from First Round Capital, Floodgate Fund and others.