Wix.com Inc., the web development company that spent an estimated $5 million on a commercial during the Super Bowl, had a winning fourth quarter and full year. And, many of its new customers are choosing to build e-commerce sites, the company said Wednesday in announcing its Q4 and 2016 earnings.
The 2.5 year-old company, which enables small businesses, artists and entrepreneurs to create their own websites, including e-commerce sites, says its fourth quarter sales grew 48% year over year to reach $84.2 million from $56.8 million a year earlier. Sales for the full year grew 43% to reach $290.1 million compared with $203.5 million in 2015.
Wix offers website templates and hosting for free and premium subscription plans ranging from $5 to $25 per month that offer such features as more bandwidth and storage. Plans that include an online store start at $17 per month.
Wix also reports that e-commerce subscriptions reached 332,000 during the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31. “Growth of e-commerce and transaction-enabled websites continues to exceed overall subscriptions growth, highlighting Wix’s broad reach with small businesses,” it says in its earnings release.
Tel Aviv, Israel-based Wix also reports:
- It added 171,000 premium subscriptions in Q4 to reach 2.5 million as of Dec. 31, a 39% increase from a year ago.
- It has more than 100 million registered users and added 5 million users in the fourth quarter.
- Customers have created 22 million mobile sites using the Wix platform.
- Wix clients have saved 480 million user contacts using the Wix MyAccount customer relationship management system, which helps business owners track customer activity data, manage relationships and communicate using Wix ShoutOut, its email marketing product.
- In June it launched Wix ADI, (Artificial Design Intelligence) an artificial intelligence website design tool. ADI can develop a website for a user automatically or show him how to do it. It matches images, text and layout by learning and building based on its knowledge of the users’ business and location.
- Last month Wix announced a partnership with payment platform Square Inc. that allows businesses to accept online payments and in-person payments via a mobile device based point-of-sale system.
- Also last month, Wix acquired CRM vendor flok for an undisclosed sum. Wix says the acquisition increases its portfolio of business technology services for small and medium businesses.
Earlier this month Wix advertised during the Super Bowl for the third straight year. To capitalize on its multimillion-dollar investment, it used Facebook Live and YouTube Live to air a teaser of its Super Bowl ad. Both Facebook and YouTube highlight when a brand a consumer follows is “live,” and Wix has 3.2 million Facebook likes, 3.2 million Facebook follows and more than 50,000 YouTube channel subscribers.
Employing Facebook Live and YouTube Live helped the brand attract attention that was easily quantifiable, Wix says, adding that within 24 hours “millions” of users had interacted with the campaign online.
Beyond the initial live effort, Wix also used video ads on Facebook and YouTube to promote the campaign. A recent Nielsen study shows that Facebook complements TV ads by helping marketers reach an additional 5% of the population that would otherwise miss a typical TV campaign. Among younger demographics, namely 18-24-year-olds and 25-34-year-olds, the effect is even more pronounced as Facebook provides an incremental 22.6% and 14.0% lift, respectively.
Data from marketing analytics company Origami Logic shows that Wix’s viral efforts paid off. From Dec. 1-Jan. 31 Wix.com generated more than twice as many YouTube video views (8.5 million) than any of the 37 Super Bowl advertisers. Skittles came in second with 3.7 million. Wix also was the most active of all Super Bowl advertisers on social media, posting 46 Super Bowl-related posts from Dec. 1-Jan. 31.
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