Convertro

Jeffrey Zwelling and David Feldman founded online retailer YLighting in 2001, investing heavily in the development of software to automate both product fulfillment and online marketing spend. In 2008, a private equity firm made a significant investment in YLighting, based in large part on its incredible operational efficiency and "difficult to believe" marketing metrics. Jeff and Dave then set off to productize the marketing software suite, the basis of which has become Convertro.

Using technologies beyond basic cookie tracking, Convertro is able to provide a richer data set that is not subject to problems that plague cookies, such as deletion, expiration, cross-domain or cross-browser issues. Convertro provides advertisers enhanced transparency into the effectiveness of their marketing channels by tracking many more customer-initiated marketing interactions than possible with conventional approaches including the ability to correlate sales completed offline with the online marketing channels driving the sale.

The resulting data can be leveraged to:

• Allocate revenue to assist-keywords higher up in the purchase funnel, leading to the acquisition of more customers without a reduction in ROAS
• Dynamically bid on ad auctions for retargeting purposes
• Justify spend on marketing channels that are "in the middle" of long sales cycles
• Fairly credit marketing partners, rather than crediting multiple partners for the same conversion event
• Identify affiliates that violate program terms (e.g., those that use unauthorized software or target search on prohibited terms)
• Create user-specific landing pages

Customers may set their own rules regarding attribution of revenue to marketing actions for ROI analysis (e.g., overweight the first click, divide evenly among all marketing actions, etc.) and this data can be fed into third party tools, such as those focusing on analytics (e.g., Omniture, Google Analytics, etc.) and bid optimization (e.g., Google Adwords, DART, Fetchback, Dotomi, etc.).

Convertro was founded in 2009 and is privately held and self-funded.