Lexity Adds Retargeting Tool For Small Businesses

Simplifying online advertising for small e-commerce business is the aim of three-year-old startup Lexity. To that end, the company provides a set of tools to automatically handle chores like search engine marketing, posting products to shopping search engines like TheFind and Google Product Search, and analytics and transaction reporting for small Web retailers. 

To these services, Lexity, formerly Vurve, has added a self-serve retargeting tool for creating and showing ads to customers that have previously visited a retailer’s site. After signing up online, Lexity merchants are asked set a minimum monthly budget of $100, with the retargeting “app” automating the ad-bidding process based on the size of an online store and the ad budget. It then generates a custom banner with store logo and other branding and served on sites around the Web visited by customers. 

Lexity said its system will also take advantage of Facebook’s recently announced ad exchange, allowing marketers to reach Facebook users based on their online activities outside the social network. It will place retargeted ads on Facebook after users browse retailers’ sites. The service will generally run retargeted ads across all major ad networks including Google, Yahoo, OpenX, and AdMeld. 

Conversion tracking and reporting on sales derived from retargeting traffic is provided through an analytics dashboard.

Lexity stresses value as a key selling point for the retargeting solution, for which it charges a 15% fee, or a minimum of $15 a month. “For a price affordable to small businesses, we help online retailers recover lost revenue from customers that previously walked away from their site,” said Lexity CEO Amit Kumar, in announcing the new service today. Kumar told AdExchanger last fall the company is focusing on long-tail businesses with $5,000 to $15,000 in media spend a month. 

To date, Lexity has raised $5.7 million in funding, including a $4.5 million round in March 2011, from venture capital firms including Spark Capital and True Ventures as well as individual investors such as Esther Dyson.