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Zarget scores $6m from Sequoia India, Accel, and Matrix

Zarget, a conversion rate optimisation and marketing automation software company, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India.
Written by Tas Bindi, Contributor

Zarget, a SaaS company that provides web optimisation and marketing automation tools, has secured $6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India, with existing investors Accel and Matrix Partners contributing to the round. This brings the total amount raised by the startup to $7.5 million.

The latest round of funding will help Zarget scale its products and take on global competitors such as Optimizely.

Four months after the launch of its platform, Zarget has attracted more than 1,000 customers in 10 countries, including Landesk in the US, BizTalk360 in the UK, and Buscape in Brazil.

The startup was founded in 2015 by three ex-Zoho employees Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat, and Santhosh Kumar, who spent a decade building business productivity tools and customer relationship management software at Zoho.

The trio wanted to put website conversion rate optimisation tools into the hands of startups, small business owners, and marketers, and effectively reduce their reliance on developers and IT teams.

The founders claim that Zarget's platform has been designed "for the masses" and that it can help users who have no coding experience improve website conversions.

From 50 cents per day, users can turn their website into a visualisation dashboard for marketing automation, optimisation and testing, and gather insights needed to make improvements on the go.

Zarget offers a number of features and functionality -- including A/B testing, heatmaps and scrollmaps, funnel analysis, form analytics, and user polls and feedback -- to help its customers improve the marketing performance of their websites.

The company also offers a Chrome plugin through which users can optimise gated/secure pages from within the browser, set up experiments, and view live reports of the experiments.

Zarget can also be used to test and optimise mobile websites, though users won't have any extra insights to work with according to Parthiban.

In October, internet usage on mobile devices exceeded desktop for the first time worldwide, according to web analytics company StatCounter.

StatCounter Global Stats found that mobile and tablet devices accounted for 51.3 percent of worldwide internet usage in October, compared to 48.7 percent via desktop.

Its CEO Aodhan Cullen said this should be a wake-up call for small businesses, sole traders, and professionals to make sure their websites are mobile friendly.

"Mobile compatibility is increasingly important not just because of growing traffic but because Google favours mobile friendly websites for its mobile search results," Cullen said.

Mobile overtook the desktop for Google searches last October when it was averaging 100 billion searches a month.

Google introduced a free online tool in June called Test My Site that tests how good or poor a website is for mobile devices and then provides recommendations on what to fix.

In October, the search engine giant then announced it would break out a mobile-only search index that will deliver more up-to-date results to smartphones than the ones it provides to desktop users.

Zarget does not operate in a quiet marketplace. Earlier this year, a tool called Weelytics was launched that allows businesses to automatically track and identify people who use their website. Using Weelytics, businesses are able to discover what brings customers to their site and what helps them convert.

Zarget also operates in a marketplace that includes players like Mixpanel, which tracks the actions people take on a mobile or web-based application.

Mixpanel allows companies to do A/B testing -- like changing the colour of a button or the copy in a call-to-action and then measuring the impact of those changes. Mixpanel has been used by companies like WordPress, Airbnb, Fitbit, Lyft, Uber, and Salesforce.

Kissmetrics and Amplitude are also more established players. The latter allows companies to segment users -- by location, platform, and more -- to understand what works for one group of users that might not work for another group of users.

Amplified also allows users to identify where in their onboarding flow or checkout sequence users are dropping off and why. It has been used by Instacart, Popsugar, Typeform, Udacity, and Yik Yak.

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