• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 22, 2014

Shopzilla, best known for its comparative shopping site, will officially rebrand its corporate name to Connexity, emphasizing the transition to support its network of sites, brands and retailers through data and marketing technologies. The name change more accurately defines a move to help marketers better understand consumers, acquire new customers at a lower cost, and increase sales supported by data.

"We have always been a data and analytics company," said Bill Glass, Connexity CEO. "We're just bringing it to market in several ways. It's a continued evolution for clients. We create qualified leads, find consumers ready to buy and drop them off. Now, we're doing this in a variety of channels."

While the name officially changes Monday, the transformation to draw the line between the comparison shopping site and agency-like advertising and marketing services has slowly been rolling out for several years. "About 80% of the company's revenue four years ago came from the comparison shopping Web site," Glass said. "Now, two-thirds of the business comes from products and services unrelated to the shopping site."

The business model gives Connexity visibility into consumer shopping intent, early trends and the ability to build lookalike audience segments for ad targeting. Across its network of sites, the company collects about 1 billion data points monthly that covers life stages and lifestyles, and has access to updates of prices and availability on about 150 million products daily.

The change enables Connexity to expand its offerings and provide one platform for many different types of advertising and marketing services. Today, Connexity doesn't offer an email CRM platform, for example. "It is logically something that would fit into that suite," Glass said, describing a dashboard that would allow marketers to see the results of all allocated media budgets. That dashboard might also include social media.

In addition to supporting retailers and brands through data and its proprietary technology platform, Los Angeles-based Connexity manages product listing ads (PLA), paid search and SEO support, tapping 15 years of experience as a top advertiser on major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. The new display media service allows marketers and agencies to build audience segments using proprietary retail data to advertise to consumers through a programmatic platform.  

The company plans to expand its cost per click (CPC) product listings marketplace supporting more than 75% of the Top IR 500 retailers. The CPC marketplace reaches more than 30 million shoppers with 150 million product listings on sites like Bizrate and Shopzilla, as well as syndication on more than 3,000 publisher partner networks.