By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA—Lots of Web analytics target site performance, the number of unique visitors and hits, even where visitors come from. Vertical Acuity, however, says it is the only company offering a way to directly measure online performance at the product level, zeroing in on who is actually engaged with a product or brand.
Founded in November 2007, Vertical Acuity has raised more than $1 million from a combination of angel backing and a venture investment from Kinetic Ventures.
Founders include Gregg Freishtat, executive chair, who has over 17 years of experience in venture management and venture investing including the founding of three successful start-ups. In 2001, Freishtat founded Proficient Systems and served as chairman and CEO until the sale of Proficient to LivePerson (NASDAQ: LPSN) in June of 2006.
Freishtat was also the founder and CEO of VerticalOne Corp., the first provider of web-based account aggregation services. VerticalOne was acquired by S1 Corporation (Nasdaq-SONE) in November 1999.
Paul Kaib, CEO, worked with Freishtat for a decade. Kaib has 20 years of experience in the technology industry with the last 10 years as an entrepreneur in two Internet start-ups. In 2001, Kaib co-founded Proficient Systems and served as Vice President of Engineering up until its acquisition to LivePerson in 2005.
Brent Walker, co-founder and CTO, has been building Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions specific to web analytics and data aggregation since the industries’ inception.
Josh Hoffmann, co-founder and chief revenue officer has over 12 years of experience in running both product and professional services organizations. He tells TechJournal South that a lot of the thought processes that went into creating Vertical Acuity resulted from prior experiences with VerticalOne and Proficient Systems.
The company’s software-as-a-service Brand 360° platform allows marketers to understand product performance across hundreds of Web sites. “You know who’s looking at your products, the search terms they’re using to get there, on what types of pages they’re most effective, and how frequently they’re accessing them. All the things Nielson or ComScore offers for a Web site, we offer at the product level,” says Hoffmann.
Initially, the company is focusing on the music industry, but it will move into additional verticals such as automotive makes and models, gaming, and consumer electronics later this year, says Hoffmann. “We’re doing case studies now and some of it depends on partnerships we’re working on,” he adds.
Brands within the entertainment industry can be defined by an artist, a song, a band, a label, or even a new genre. Because so many interpretations exist for what consumers see as a brand, brand and product management on the Internet is near impossible, and 99 percent of all music related activity online goes untracked, the company says.
Because the industry is moving to an all digital distribution model, new tools are needed to track demand and consumption patterns across the hundreds of sites that distribute, share, and socialize music.
The company’s Vertical Acuity Focus is a targeting engine that allows Web sites and advertisers to target and optimize both content and ad campaigns against any artist, album, or track monitor the brand as it proliferates on the Internet, resulting in better allocation of marketing and advertising spend, the company says.
It provides insight into listener tastes, trends, and behavior by genre, artist, album, and tracks beyond simple sales data. It also provides anonymous, competitive benchmark data for Vertical Acuity publishers to compare their product and content performance against their industry – free of charge.
The system allows an artist or marketers to make very targeted offers to only the most engaged of consumers, says Hoffmann.
“We’re able to look at any of the 250,000 artists we track and see they had 200,000 views across 20 to 40 different Web sites. This gives our Web sites and marketers a way for the artist to reach the consumers most likely to act on the offer because we have all the data on who is most engaged and most likely to act on those offers.”
The company is beta-testing the system on 20 different music sites.
© 2009, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
