Let’s follow some money today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with a $300 million funding by Website builder Squarespace, which has grown to include ecommerce, email, SEO, and social content. The round brings total funding to $578 million at a $10 billion valuation. No word on revenue although a newspaper article last November pegged it at $500 million pre-pandemic.
We also have a $230 million Series F from Yotpo, which offers customer engagement modules for SMS messaging, loyalty and referrals, and user reviews, comments, and content. It’s an integrated platform but also connects with ecommerce platforms including Shopify, Magento, SAP, Salesforce, and BigCommerce. Total funding is now $406 million and the deal values the company at $1.4 billion, a hefty 14x their $100 million revenue.
But, hey, we can’t spend all our time worrying about privacy. So let’s worry that 44% of marketers aren’t effectively targeting their marketing to improve lifetime customer value. In fact, just 17% even do a good job of tracking it, according to Deloitte Digital and CMO Council. Good news for CDP fans: marketers top priority for the next 12 months is building a unified customer view.
Changes in marketing channels and data access have made advertising measurement more important, and challenging, than ever. Taking advantage of growing interest in the topic, Bain Capital is selling Kantar Group’s audience measurement division, Kantar Media, to global investment firm H.I.G. Capital for “approximately $1 billion”. Kantar Media accounts for 4,500 of Kantar Group’s 25,000 employees.