A click can only tell you so much.
Say someone clicks on a webpage 10 times in a row. That can either mean the person is a super-annoyed rage clicker who can’t find what they want – or a customer having a good experience clicking on multiple product pictures before making a purchase.
Tracking the click doesn’t give you the full picture, because you don’t know what someone is seeing when they click, said Steve Glanz, CRO of Convizit, an analytics startup that uses AI to collect and contextualize web event data.
After structuring the data, Convizit’s tagging technology delivers it to third-party tools used by the site, such as a customer data platform or a BI solution.
“Implementing those tools can be a long, challenging process,” Glanz said. “We’re trying to make it easier and quicker so you can implement them in a day or two.”
Convizit was co-founded in 2017 by CEO Daniel Bashari, formerly a data intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces. Glanz brings the ad tech experience. He founded and sold cross-device vendor Crosswise to Oracle for $50 million in 2016.
After raising a $5 million seed round from Israeli VC firm Pitango in March 2020, Convizit, which has 15 employees, is in the midst of raising its Series A now to grow the team.
Glanz spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Is site analytics broken?
STEVE GLANTZ: There are a lot of problems with the current process.
One is the amount of time it takes to actually tag a site. And most of that work is still manual.
You need to define the data you want to collect, get engineers involved and oftentimes an outside consultant, agency or system integrator. Then you have to check to make sure it was done correctly and if you make any change or something breaks you need to go through that entire process again. It’s not a one-time thing.
On top of that, a lot of the data that gets collected lacks meaning or what we call context.
What do you mean by context?
I might know if someone clicked add-to-cart, but what were they seeing on the page when they did it? Did they see a message that the product was on sale, out of stock, that free shipping was on offer, that certain colors weren’t available?
If you don’t feed your tools with the right data, you miss steps in the funnel and end up trying to do personalization based on high-level metrics rather than on an understanding of what users are actually doing and seeing.
Who are your customers?
We’re seeing the most traction with anyone doing anything related to website event data, from product analytics tools, CDPs and marketing automation tools to the agencies and system integrators that help their clients implement those products.
Our sweet spots are ecommerce, retail and SaaS products.
SaaS companies in particular are not focused on how people use their product, and some are actually clueless on that front.
Are ecommerce companies clueless?
No. But outside of the biggest companies, they really don’t have detailed data. If you have a 10-person team just focused on tagging, that’s one thing. But most companies can’t afford that and it’s even hard for a lot of the larger companies to keep up.
How does Convizit’s technology work?
There are two pillars of our technology: automation and intelligence. It’s easy to capture a lot of data and it’s easy to be intelligent about the data you capture if you do it manually. But it’s hard to do both; And that’s what we do.
Customers put our script on their website and after our algorithm has time to learn the site and see some real traffic, we create an output for every single event along with a name for each. We also do what we call intelligent grouping of events, meaning we don’t just look at how an element on the page is coded, we understand its function and can group elements together by function even if they’re located in different areas of a site.
We also do tracking continuity so that small changes to a website’s UI – like changing the color of a button – doesn’t break the tracking mechanism.
But one of the most important parts of our technology is our ability to understand context and to know how different elements on a page relate to each other, so that when I tell you that a user did X you know everything that user was looking at during the moment relevant to the action.
Devil’s advocate, why not just use Google Tag Manager?
If you have a simple site, like a three-page restaurant site or a law firm website, you don’t need us and Google Tag Manager is perfectly fine. But if you’re a dynamic site that changes all the time, you can’t be manually tagging your website. Google Tag Manager isn’t built for scale on a complex site. It’s not automated at all.
How does the cookie situation affect you?
We only deal with a company’s first-party data, so we’re not impacted by whatever happens to the cookie. But we do allow our customers to send us their customer IDs for known users, which is important for multiple use cases, but especially for CDPs.
When you sold Crosswise to Oracle in 2016, it was still the heyday of cross-device. How did life change internally at Oracle in 2018 after GDPR went into effect?
I can’t say too much about what happened internally at Oracle, but there was definitely a moment when everyone got really nervous about GDPR. Although things seem to have calmed down again, there was a point between when we sold Crosswise and I left Oracle two years later when it was a very, very big deal.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
