Dynamic Yield, a yield optimization platform that has positioned itself as a quasi-ad server for content, has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Marker L.L.C. The Tel Aviv-based company has plans to grow its sales and operations teams in New York and London.
Also joining the round as a distribution partner is ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG, a large German media company, which will jointly run a Munich office and help Dynamic Yield expand into Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The distribution partnership figures to give Dynamic Yield a ready-made foothold in the German-speaking market, as ProSiebenSat.1 owns a number of major digital media and ecommerce brands there.
The company also plans to double headcount this year from 20 to more than 40, mainly in sales and operations roles.
Additionally, Dynamic Yield will roll out a self-service offering designed for companies with less than $1 million in revenue in the weeks to come. Instead of installing tags on their website and running the product in-house, customers can filter users through a Dynamic Yield URL that runs Dynamic Yield’s content optimization algorithms through their servers.
Dynamic Yield’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) product allows publishers, retailers and Web marketers to optimize their content to increase viewership and drive sales. For example, a newspaper editor might input two photos to appear as the leading image for a front page story, and in real time, Dynamic Yield will measure which image is driving the most traffic for certain users and display it accordingly. Similarly, a retailer might drive traffic to a certain landing page depending on the profile of the user.
By applying what CEO Liad Agmon has called “ad serving-like algorithms” to content, Dynamic Yield sees a future where content optimization and ad tech companies more closely align over “platforms that can integrate really well into the existing (content management systems) of customers,” according to Agmon. “It’s the next big market.”
Following a similar track, social sharing platform AddThis recently rolled out a dashboard for its 13 million publisher users to analyze the performance of its “recommended content widgets” to make real-time decisions on the best-performing content to display.
Agmon said brand advertisers have a “less critical” need to measure on a performance basis than retailers or publishers. “(A brand) looks at the market differently than retailers,” Agmon said. “When (retailers) spend their money online, they want to make sure it’s a positive ROI. They measure everything through the prism of ROI on their campaign.”
