Today, DC and Silicon Valley startup Spinnakr launched in public beta and announced an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, 500 Startups, Point Nine Capital, and others.
Spinnakr takes a new approach to analytics. While traditional web analytics offer complex graphs and reports that only a data scientist can truly decipher, Spinnakr distills the data into recommended actions.
Behind the scenes, the little snippet of Spinnakr code on your website is analyzing visitors and their behavior. For example, it might recommend you add an AngelList button if the visitor is an investor, or a special discount for visitors from Pinterest. If lots of readers are pouring in from a Spanish-language site, it might recommend a translation. Those changes can be made by email, within Spinnakr, or directly on your website using Spinnakr’s editor.
This all falls under the category of “targeted messaging”: using different language and marketing to communicate to different types of users. It’s based on the belief that who you are and where you come from is important: it affects how you use a website and what information you might be looking for. If you tailor your communication, the logic goes, these people will be more likely to stick around, become a user, and eventually pay money.
By looking at a variety of factors, from incoming links to search terms to visit history, the Spinnakr tool can actually segment visitors into categories like investors, early adopters, job seekers, loyal visitors, and enterprise customers.
Spinnakr joins a host of other services that are recognizing the importance of targeted messaging. Monetate lets you personalize your site for certain types of visitors; Adobe and Hubspot have targeted messaging tools in their marketing suites. Startups can create multiple landing pages for consumer and enterprise customers, or even for investors. Or they can use Pitch Sites, multiple one-page websites created by a company who believes that regular websites are too generic.
That’s a sentiment that Spinnakr can understand. “People think of websites as these dead static documents that they slap up on the Internet and hope that good stuff happens,” says cofounder Adam Bonnifield. “We’re interested in a vision of a website where it’s less of a dead static document and more of a living, breathing organism.”
