LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / February 4, 2022 / UK-based marketing technology startup SegmentStream announced a successful seed funding round, raising $2.7 million for its "cookie-free" online marketing analytics solution. Investment was led by VC fund Fort Ross Ventures, based in Israel and Silicon Valley, together with the OKS Group, and a group of angel investors, among them Liad Agmon of Dynamic Yield, and Ragnar Sass, Martin Henk and Martin Tajur of Pipedrive.
SegmentStream addresses the challenge of determining attribution and return on ad spend (ROAS) for online paid ads, an issue that is rapidly becoming critical with the imminent death of the cookie.
For a long time, marketers have struggled to stitch together online customer journeys, and assess the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns. Cookie tracking used to be a key tool, but rising limitations and restrictions, like the disablement of first-party cookies after just seven days, and growing public antipathy towards third-party cookies, is quickly rendering cookie-based ROAS calculations irrelevant.
After Apple decided to make it the default to opt out of third-party cookies, the numbers agreeing to their use fell significantly. Firefox and Safari browsers already block them, and Google will discontinue them by 2023.
"It is technologically impossible to rely on the old cookie-based approach for the proper calculation of ROAS, since most advertising clicks don't get the credit they deserve," says Constantine Yurevich, co-founder and CEO of SegmentStream. "The clock is ticking for marketers to find a viable alternative to cookie-based ad tracking."
SegmentStream aims to resolve this difficulty by applying proprietary machine learning (ML) algorithms to analyze first party user behavior data, in order to evaluate the incremental performance of each marketing channel and campaign. SegmentStream provides marketers with "Probabilistic Conversions," namely insights which demonstrate the actual contribution of each traffic source towards future sales.
"We're always looking for companies who have the foresight to disrupt key spaces just as the need for it arises," says Victor Orlovski, founder and managing partner at Fort Ross Ventures. "Digital advertising is undergoing massive changes, and we're excited to partner with SegmentStream as they have the leadership and innovation needed to emerge as an industry leader," he added.
In contrast with current attribution platforms, which reverse-engineer attribution from the time of conversion backwards, SegmentStream's cookie-less, future-looking solution focuses on predictive attribution, providing marketing teams with valuable data that they can feed back into ad platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Ads to automate ad optimization. In this way, it helps marketing teams more accurately gauge the value of marketing channels and campaigns which don't directly drive sales.
Established by Pavel Petrinich, Oleg Katryshev, and Constantine Yurevich, SegmentStream, a TechStars alumni, is based in the UK with over 100 customers worldwide, including KitchenAid, Nespresso, and Freshly Cosmetics. The SegmentStream team consists of 30 employees across five countries and plans to double its headcount in 2022.
About SegmentStream
SegmentStream is a UK-based predictive marketing attribution and optimisation platform that helps marketers to evaluate and improve performance of digital advertising in a new, post-cookie era. The company has more than 100 clients across the globe, including leading brands such as Freshly Cosmetics, Kave Home, KitchenAid, Nespresso, and others.
CONTACT:
Dan Edelstein
[email protected]
SOURCE: SegmentStream