French Advertising Company Publicis Buys eCommerce Analytics Firm Profitero

Publicis Groupe, a French advertising holding company, has acquired Profitero, an eCommerce software company providing brand analytics, a report Tuesday (May 3) from The Wall Street Journal said.

This comes as clients of marketing firms are looking more for eCommerce services.

Profitero’s work involves digital commerce software and services for brands, such as offerings helping out with comparing prices with competitors, monitoring product availability and tracking customer ratings and reviews.

The company helps brands show up on a retailer’s digital shelf when customers search for terms that can sometimes be even simple things like “chocolate bar,” according to Profitero President Sarah Hofstetter.

The software examines public data from retailers, synthesizing it to provide insights and predictions.

“Search results are going to vary both by retailer and the levers that brands can pull to ensure that they get to the top …”  Hofstetter said. “There’s anything from ratings and reviews, to price adjustments, to promotional activity to supply-chain fulfillment, to which pictures and videos and text you use, how many bullets — there are hundreds of levers that you can pull, just to make sure that you show up more for the term ‘chocolate bar.’”

According to Publicis Chief Executive Arthur Sadoun, the deal would add to Publicis’ clients’ ability to grow their online sales and add market share. He said marketers have to look at things like competitors prices, product availability, opportunities to improve unpaid searches, or they’ll risk losing business.

See also: Retailers Tap ‘Composable Commerce’ as Consumer Expectations, eCommerce Complexity, Rise

Brands have only a few opportunities to satisfy the expectations of their consumers, Julie Mall, vice president of global solutions consulting at Elastic Path, told PYMNTS.

She recommends a “composable commerce” approach, in which vendors “composed together,” to give retailers and brands a range of prepackaged solutions through application programming interfaces (APIs).