Marketing vendor Connexity (formerly Shopzilla) has acquired Hitwise from web measurement firm Experian. The deal enables Connexity to offer retailers a web-based way to gauge how well they’re performing against rivals and to segment consumer shopping behavior by demographics, brand preferences and online and offline shopping, says Connexity CEO Bill Glass.
Connexity manages retailers’ product listings search advertisements and their display media campaigns with the goal of acquiring customers. The company’s Bizrate point of sale customer feedback platform aims to help retailers retain those customers. With the Hitwise acquisition, Connexity hopes to offer competitive intelligence and benchmarking tools designed to help retailers identify new opportunities to reach customers.
Connexitywill use Hitwise’s newest product, AudienceView, to give retailers a deeper look at consumer behavior than Hitwise’s current system of comparing the percentages of consumers coming to their rivals’ websites through search, social media and other entry points, Glass says. The legacy Hitwise product provides information on clickstreams in and out of clients’ websites. It can identify the percentage of a competing retailer’s consumer visits coming from a Google search. Glass says the AudienceView update adds the ability to segment consumer audiences by traits such as gender, age, income, ethnicity, brand preferences and media consumption. AudienceView lets retailers find out, for example, on which websites do men age 55 and older who are in the market for wearable fitness gear spend their time?
The information comes from two sources: Hitwise collects data from 7 billion web pages on a sample of 10 million unique visitors a month derived from undisclosed data partnerships. A portion of the data is from Internet Service Providers, Glass says.
The consumer segmentation and demographic information comes from Connexity’s partnership with Simmons Research, which gets its data from a panel of 25,000 consumers who fill out a survey.
Web traffic measurement firm Hitwise has more than 900 clients, of which 25% are retailers. Glass says Hitwise aims to expand into the retail sector based on Connexity’s relationships with more than 10,000 retailers in the United States and Europe.
The deal comes six months after Connexity acquired PriceGrabber.
“Retailers using AudienceView can see demographic profiles of consumers in certain regions of the country, how those consumers interact with their websites and their competitors’ websites, what those consumers do on social media, which consumers have a smartphone and who also bought a new car in the past 12 months,” Glass says.
Retailers can use that data to rethink their ad creative, update their media planning and then, in the future, execute a campaign from within a single web-based suite of marketing tools, Glass says.
Connexity’s owner, private equity firm Symphony Technology Group, acquired Simmons Research, a research company known for its National Consumer Study, in a separate transaction on Monday. The two transactions together were completed for $46.5 million, plus a further potential earnout of up to $5 million.
Hitwise will operate as a standalone business, separate from Simmons. Simmons and Hitwise now operate under a combined business called Experian Consumer Insights, but they will separate into two companies in 2016, Symphony says.
Connexity, listed in the Internet Retailer 2016-17 Guide to E-Commerce Technology, already offers retail product listings, voice of the customer feedback via Bizrate Insights and programmatic audience targeting—all powered by data from its retail network with over 100 million in-market consumers per month, Glass says.
Experian, whose rival TransUnion last week acquired fraud protection firm Trustev for $44 million, is focusing on its credit reports, credit ratings and fraud protection service.
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