Monetate Seeking to Employ 200 by Year End

Monetate has increased its staff by 57 to 175 so far this year and has 25 open positions it wants to fill by year’s end.

The Conshohocken, Pa., provider of e-commerce technology is adding people to accommodate its growth in customers and revenue, as well as to support its expansion into new vertical and international markets.

“Our goal is the same this year as it was last year — we want to double the business and we’re on track again to doing that in 2013,” John Healy, Monetate’s chief operating officer, told me in a phone interview Friday.

I spoke to Healy because Monetate put out a press release announcing its performance, in which it said its revenue grew 127 percent in the first half of 2013 from the first half of 2012.

Healy wouldn’t tell me what Monetate’s revenue was, or reveal other metrics about the privately held company besides what was in its press release. He did say, however, that Monetate and its customers benefitted from the fact that e-commerce sales in the second quarter were up nearly 19 percent from a year ago and at their highest level since 2007.

Monetate has moved on from its initial focus of providing e-commerce website operators with technology that makes it easy for them to personalize their websites’ appearance and test different marketing campaigns.

That technology is still at the core of Monetate’s business, but Monetate’s customers now also use it to help identify market segments that are important to them and better market to those segments.

As an example, Healy said he recently looked for products on the websites of two major home-improvement chains, visiting the sites repeatedly. He eventually got an email with an offer of a discount from one of the chains, but neither it nor its competitor tried to communicate with him while he was on their websites.

“We think that’s backwards marketing,” he said.

To combat that, Monetate recently launched LivePredict, which enables its customers to identify the market segments that are important to them and make offers to people in those segments while the people are on their websites.

The product examines the characteristics of everyone who has made a purchase on a website and then sees what the people who have spent a lot of money on the site have in common and what the people who haven’t spent much money on the site have in common.

For example, Healy said, people who visit a website through an iPhone make purchases at much lower rates than people who visit it through a tablet or desktop computer. In that case, he said, LivePredict can tell the website operator that it should market differently to visitors on iPhones, perhaps by giving them better offers to entice them to make a purchase.

LivePredict also can analyze online marketing campaigns and see which segments of customers they performed well with and which they didn’t perform well with.

Ecommerce retailers remain Monetate’s largest group of customers, but the company is gaining traction among travel and hospitality businesses, and Healy said its efforts in that area are leading it to get some customers in the entertainment and publishing industries.

Monetate also is expanding globally. The company opened a London office in June to serve Europe, the Middle East and Africa and now employs 10 there. It also is getting into what Healy called the BRIC countries — Brazil, India and China — starting with Brazil where it is working with a partner that helped it land its first customer in the country.

On the home front, Monetate is still paying $2,000 bonuses for referrals of software engineers that it hires, and tapping the talent pool at area colleges and universities.

“We’re very excited about where we are right now and where our prospects are and we look forward to continuing to add value to our customers and make sure they’re successful and growing our business,” Healy said.