Dubbed the Google Analytics for brick-and-mortar retailers, Euclid, a shopper analytics platform, announced today that it has closed a $17.3 million funding round led by Benchmark Capital with participation from NEA, Harrison Metal, and TMT Ventures. Since launching in 2011, the startup has used its technology to provide real-world metrics for retailers in several industries, including auto parts, home improvement, and apparel. The company will use the funding to scale its services and meet the demands of its growing client base.
John Fu, Director of Marketing at Euclid, spoke with BetaKit about the company’s approach to giving offline retailers access to the same data and insights online retailers live and breathe by. “What we’re trying to do is help brick-and-mortar retailers understand not only how effective their marketing is, but their in-store operations, staffing, and in-store placement and how effectively they’re doing that,” said Fu in an interview. “The way we address that is by helping retailers understand the opportunity for bringing customers into the store. Drawing customers as they’re walking by, and once they’re in the store, engaging them…to ultimately keep the customer coming back.”
The company enables retailers to measure activity in and around their store in a manner that’s a little different from what they’re used to with door clickers or cameras to count how many customers walk in and out each day. Instead Euclid detects a customer’s Wifi-enabled smartphone, and collects the phone’s MAC address (not tied to any personal information), and stores it on its servers, allowing clients to access a dashboard similar to what they would expect from Google Analytics.
Previously the company required retailers to install preconfigured sensors in their stores, but when the company saw the growth opportunity and started working with larger retailers, they had to find another way in order to scale. Which is why it launched ‘Euclid Zero’ in January, allowing the same sensor functionality to be switched on in a retailer’s existing Wifi console, offered in partnership with wireless access point providers like Aruba Networks, Aerohive Networks, and Xirrus among others.
Though no personal information is revealed about individual customers, Euclid clients can see insights like Engagement Rate, Visit Duration, and Visit Frequency, data which can help them make important decisions around their in-store and external marketing efforts. There is no charge for either the integration or the sensor, which Fu said typically covers a 24,000 square foot radius, instead the SaaS startup charges $200 per month for access to the data it collects.
Other startups looking to disrupt the retail analytics space include Shopperception, built on Microsoft’s Kinect technology to provide retailers with heatmaps and traffic flow analysis, similar European sensor-based offline analytics tool RapidBlue, and Prism Skylabs, which provide privacy-protected streams of real-time video using existing surveillance cameras. According to Fu, Euclid’s founding team, which helped found Google Analytics and Shopper Trak, in addition to its privacy forward nature and now its ability to scale without having to install any hardware, is what will allow it to gain an edge in the space.
With this latest round of funding behind them, the company will look to build up both its development team to expand product capabilities, and its insights teams which works directly with existing customers to build action plans around their data. It makes sure to put a notice outside each store providing users with ample notice and opt-out instructions in case they don’t want their information to be tracked, and believes that with its data, retailers can now decrease their offline bounce rate, increase their unique visitors and more importantly improve their conversion rates. Whether consumers will be comfortable with sharing their data, even anonymously, is another question, but as offline analytics become as ubiquitous as online analytics, the number of retailers to adopt these solutions will likely only increase.