Pinfluencer, the startup BetaKit covered only a month ago to highlight the Pinterest analytics and promotions platform’s growth with clients like Sephora and Zappos on board, announced today that it will be rebranding as Piqora. In addition, the startup will be launching a new social e-commerce product called Gallery, an automated visual feed brands can set up as landing pages for consumers to browse their top trending products on Pinterest and Facebook in an effort to help marketers drive higher conversion rates from their social traffic.
CEO Sharad Verma in an interview with BetaKit discussed what led to the rebranding and how the startup eventually plans to tackle additional platforms down the line. “We’re evolving into a new name because we didn’t want confusion around whether we were Klout for Pinterest, we also didn’t want to get clubbed with companies with ‘pin’ in their names because we’re an enterprise company with a lot of momentum,” said Verma. “Piqora is not necessarily about branching out to multiple platforms immediately, it’s really about being the complete marketing suite for Pinterest. But as a company we will evolve into including other networks.”
The new product, Gallery, is a merchandising engine that helps marketers build visual landing pages which can either be stand-alone, an embeddable widget, a Facebook tab, or as a website page showcasing the products with the most likes and pins. Through it, brands are able to highlight their top socially curated content while creating a visual e-commerce experience of in-stock products, with each Gallery page showcasing actual product titles, real-time pricing, and designed for social sharing on both Pinterest and Facebook. The company already has several of its existing clients on board including Overstock and Cost Plus World Market.
By monitoring both pinning activity and examining other variables like search queries, purchase and traffic data from the startup’s integrations with Google Analytics, Omniture, and Coremetrics, Gallery populates a feed of products end users are most likely to purchase and share. The company is still experimenting with pricing models and deciding whether to go down the route of having a CPM model based on the incremental traffic they help drive, or a SaaS-based model.
With the rebranding and the new product, Piqora effectively wants to differentiate itself from other startups like Curlate, who also decided to stay away from putting a ‘pin’ in their name to indicate interest in supporting other platforms and has shown that by adding Instagram integration, in addition to others like PinReach, Octopin, and most recently Pinster. Other ways it looks to set itself apart is by offering a more robust suite that includes a promotions platforms to run contests and sweepstakes, social traffic analytics, pin scheduler, influencer targeting, and now Gallery. Verma also noted that while others might be more focused on only providing insights and analytics data, Piqora’s focus is on driving its clients ROI and sales conversion from their online activity.
But something to watch out for might just be the visual social network giant itself, with Pinterst launching its own analytics tool for businesses hinting at a possible monetization strategy which it could easily extend to include much of the same features offered by existing third-party providers today. Though how flushed out its offering will grow to be is only something to be speculated about, none the less it shows no signs of slowing down having only recently closed a $200 million funding round. With Piqora eying other platforms like Tumblr in the near future, diversifying the platforms it supports may be one way to offset whatever move Pinterst makes next.