Web rank site SimilarWeb buys adtech start-up Swayy

The firms, both Israeli, provide their customers with ideas on how to get more eyeballs

Israeli digital measurement company SimilarWeb on Monday announced it was buying its second start-up, Swayy, for a sum estimated by analysts at $5 million.

Based in Israel, Swayy analyzes data and web content to figure out what links users of a website are most likely to click on. The buyout will take effect immediately.

Swayy’s app analyzes social media posts, audience engagement and real-time trends to provide custom-curated content that matches a brand’s image and to empower sharing across social networks. The company developed proprietary natural language processing and personalization engines, which it uses to analyze content and match it to trending topics on social media. The platform can deliver, according to Swayy, more relevant articles, ads, and other data to users, increasing their engagement with a website.

Tools like those produced by Swayy are likely to be greatly appreciated by SimilarWeb customers, who engage with the firm to measure and improve their engagement with audiences. SimilarWeb ranks websites, providing dozens of metrics for free, including how sites engage with social media, which sites refer users to a specific site, which search engines are used to access the site, where a site’s readers are located, what users are interested in, and what other sites they visit, and what similar sites readers visit.

For its premium service, it dives even deeper into site stats, offering help and tips into how a site can improve its ranking, audience engagement, and overall experience – the elements that go into determining how much a site can charge advertising platforms to place ads, among other things.

Just about every website on the Internet wants to know at some point how many people are looking at it, and there are dozens of services available to do that. But SimilarWeb is currently the biggest, beating out top competitors Alex and comScore, according to the company.

Backed by investors Elevator Fund, Star Farm Ventures and RSL, Swayy launched in 2013 and has enabled clients around the world to find and share hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, the company said. Swayy’s four founders, Ohad Frankfurt, Oz Katz, Shlomi Babluki, and Lior Degani, will join SimilarWeb’s staff of 200 in Tel Aviv, managing their engine from within the company.

“The Swayy team are super talented and we have been tracking their progress for awhile,” said Or Offer, CEO and founder of SimilarWeb. “When the opportunity came to bring them into the SimilarWeb fold we didn’t hesitate for a second. We have great ambitions at SimilarWeb, having grown from 70 to close to 200 employees over the last 12 months. The Swayy team will help us improve the quality and depth of our products right from the start.”