TellApart

About TellApart

TellApart was a marketing technology firm established in 2009 by former Google executives Josh McFarland and Mark Ayzenshtat. Their experience at Google, particularly McFarland's role in co-founding the AdWords API team, shaped the company's vision to help e-commerce businesses leverage their own customer data for revenue growth. The founders identified a critical need among online retailers who possessed valuable customer data but lacked the tools to effectively analyze and act on it.

The company's core offering was a cloud-based customer data platform that provided predictive marketing solutions. TellApart's technology worked by placing a JavaScript tag on a retailer's website, which then collected and analyzed transactional and behavioral data. This data was used to compute a proprietary "Customer Quality Score" (CQScore) for each shopper, identifying high-value prospects in real-time. This allowed clients to deliver personalized, product-specific display ads and emails to the most promising customers, a method they termed "Transactional Retargeting."

The business operated on a pay-for-performance model, taking a percentage of revenue only after a customer clicked on a TellApart-generated ad and completed a purchase. This no-risk proposition was attractive to its client base, which included major retail brands like Neiman Marcus, Wayfair, Warby Parker, and Sur La Table. The firm demonstrated significant success, with clients reporting substantial lifts in overall revenue. TellApart's growth was fueled by $17.7 million in funding over two rounds from prominent investors such as Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.

A significant milestone in the company's history was its acquisition by Twitter in April 2015 for approximately $533 million in stock. This move was part of Twitter's strategy to enhance its direct response advertising capabilities by integrating TellApart's expertise in cross-device retargeting and dynamic product ads. At the time of the acquisition, TellApart had successfully grown its annual revenue from $7 million to a reported $100 million by shifting its focus to larger enterprise accounts.