New company identifies most valuable ecommerce users, provides targeted ads

For companies that process online payments, customer retention is a key website metric. One company, founded by former Google executives, is now helping ecommerce websites do just that - identify their best customers, and target them with specific advertisements.

TellApart, unveiled Tuesday, uses a company's own customer data - "the actions and transactions from real people who are willing to spend real money on the goods and services you offer," according to the company's website - and analyzes it to predict customer value "with an order of magnitude greater accuracy than models created by hand."

The site then takes it one step further, creating dynamic display ads shown to the website's "best customers" that are based on products the customer has already expressed the most interest in. TellApart calls this technique "retargeting."

Also innovative is the pricing model - the company covers the costs of the ads, the technology and the data storage, and charges the website only a percentage of the revenue garnered from transactions that are converted from TellApart display ads.

This kind of "retargeting" has a good deal of promise for companies that process online payments - TechCrunch notes that "the value a user brings to an ecommerce site through [TellApart] is roughly 2x the original value of the customer," the company's founders told the news provider.