Israeli Digital Marketing Startup Fixel Becomes Latest Techstars Alum to Relocate to Atlanta

Brick and mortar stores see it often: potential customers are enticed inside by window displays, talk to retail associates, sometimes even try on an item of clothing or test a gadget — before leaving empty-handed. It can be frustrating for the shop owner and employees to see customers come and go without buying anything.

That engagement issue occurs in e-commerce shops, as well. Shop owners spend their hard-earned money on expensive online ad campaigns, only to come out of it with few real customers. Digital ads just don’t tell the full engagement story.

“How many times have you visited a site without making a purchase and then you see their ads across other sites? You see them everywhere, but you’re still not going to purchase something. Those re-marketing campaigns costs a fortune for the advertisers,” says Etgar Shpivak.

In 2018, the U.S. retail industry is on track to spend more than $20 billion on digital ads, with $16.3 billion on mobile ads alone. But retailers are still struggling with getting a high view on how to target the customers that matter most. This is a problem Shpivak encountered during his 15-plus years in digital marketing.

Now CEO of automated segmentation tool Fixel, Shpivak and his team help advertisers distinguish between the relevant people who visit your site and the digital window shoppers. The platform uses AI-driven algorithms to understand how users engage with e-commerce sites, and separates them into engagement buckets by score — basic, medium and high.

Many marketing tools track how often customers add items to their cart. However, this tends to be only 10 percent or less of the visitors to the site. Fixel captures over 60 different engagement signals including clicking, time spent on-site, scrolling, and more.

Shpivak shares that by understanding those actions and honing in on the levels of engagement, advertisers won’t waste money on re-marketing users that likely won’t convert. Engagement often has a direct connection with purchase intent, he says. Fixel helps them reduce lead cost and increase conversion rates.

“Segmentation is important for advertisers because ad pricing has become very expensive. We’re here to help them to focus their marketing dollars in the best way,” says Shpivak.

All the marketer has to do is add the installation code to their site, where the machine learning tool will run in the background capturing data. The tool also can easily be added to existing ad platforms like Facebook and Google to avoid training. By the end of 2018, they will be integrating Shopify as well.

Fixel targets e-commerce sites with 40,000 visitors or more. Its pricing tiers are based on the amount of traffic, targeting B2C e-commerce shops and digital advertising agencies. They’re currently in a pilot with Cox Automotive.

The Israeli startup went through the Techstars Atlanta accelerator program and closed their pre-seed round this year. They’re gearing up to raise a seed round in early 2019 to open their headquarters in Atlanta.