Today is a big day for Lengow and for Mickael and Jérémie, the company’s co-founders!

We are indeed very pleased to welcome to the Lengow team  Virginie de Malavois, the former Sales Director of Shopping.com, who will be in charge of launching Lengow in Canada and more precisely in Montreal!

The launch is planned for the 1^st of October, but I’m sure we’ll talk about it again on the blog before then

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So here we are; Lengow is celebrating its 2^nd year of life, its first two candles. Lengow is 2 years old!

As we did the year before, it was important for us to take a small step back in order to provide a report of the past 12 months and to see that, once again, Lengow has reached some important milestones.

It’s important sometimes to stop and revel in all that you’ve accomplished.

THE Team

A company is nothing without that which makes up its heart and soul, the essence of its success: its team. Lengow is now a company having more than 20 employees. There were only 8 of us in July 2010, and we have effectively doubled our workforce since then.

We are quite proud of this because, without beating around the bush, it’s important for us to create employment. When you set up a company, you do it for this reason too, and it’s a particular and an extremely enjoyable feeling to know that the employees of your company are happy to be there and are invested and glad to all be working together.

We predict a lot more recruitment for 2011, in France and also in other countries. We can’t wait for these new people to arrive!

Thanks to Kevin, Laure, Elodie, Benoit, Hervé, David, Damien, Tristan, Rozenn, Guillaume, Mélanie, Christelle, Nabil, Marine, Morgan, Clémence, Nadia, Dalila, Kathryn and Kimberly. Lengow wouldn’t be what it is without you!

The Clients

This year has been full of new signatures! Even if the competition is fierce, our clients have chosen to sign with Lengow and nowhere else.

The constant trust that’s been placed in us has reconfirmed the fact that we do help online retailers every day and that our solution provides an answer to a real need.

We now have more than 400 clients in France as well as in Germany and the UK. We have effectively doubled our number of clients in just 12 months.

The Solution

So much evolution!

We’ve spent a lot of time developing the solution and we continue to do so every day, all for one single objective: help the retailers!

Thanks to them, we’ve established a large number of elite functionalities which are still offered by us alone! Certain competitors think they can accomplish the same task as Lengow, but many features of the solution have been around for a while and have yet to be copied.

The solution has reached maturity, but why stop there?? We have a reputation for being a bit hyperactive here at Lengow. We rarely stop and we’re always looking for the next technical innovation which will make all the difference. We’re constantly making improvements in order to become a major reference in the e-commerce sector.

This year we’ve also begun developing our other new products, such as TagCapsule. This is our universal tracker which allows a retailer to no longer have to manage multiple trackers on a daily basis, such as those for Adwords, Analytics, Criteo, Shopping.com or Xiti.

In order to spread the word and warn the masses, we won’t stop! Lengow is a company of techies and geeks, passionate about innovation. Our leading motive is to incessantly offer these innovations to retailers – we live for this and this alone!

Be ready to keep up with the rhythm, these past two years have only been the beginning!

The World

This past year has also seen the launch of two countries back to back: the UK and Germany.

Since January 2011, we’ve launched ourselves into these two countries in order to confront the two biggest e-commerce markets in Europe. We’re delighted about the initial results as they’ve helped us to realize that Lengow has a strong hand to play in these two countries!

2011 will also see the opening of several other countries, complete with physical installations. We’ll be opening offices in the principal European countries!

The month of October will also see the establishment of Lengow in Canada, as we’ll be opening an office in Montreal with a dream team who’ll definitely make some noise!

Of course, we’ve still got the USA in our sights for 2012, and it’s our sworn objective to succeed in penetrating this complex market, which is a gigantic but exciting task to tackle!

The Future

The future of Lengow will see a strengthening of our solution in order to progress even further with the functionalities. We have a ton of ideas and we intend to launch them very soon!

As we said, we’ll also see the opening of several countries in Europe and an office in North America. This is a great challenge which has presented itself and we’re motivated to approach it in the best possible way. We’re more than ready to climb this mountain!!

But of course the bright future of Lengow is also thanks to Alven Capital. As you probably know, Lengow has gone through a second round of funding with $1.8 million from Alven Capital. Locked down in just 3 months, this second round gives us the opportunity to steadily continue our growth while also reaching an important new milestone: the international stage.

We are delighted to welcome Alven to our capital. Alven is the perfect partner for Lengow, and we were hooked from the very beginning. They’re the financial partner Lengow needed to continue to grow.

We thank them for their trust in us and we hope we won’t disappoint them!

Kima Ventures, with whom we underwent our first round of funding, of course remains within the Lengow capital and we’re very proud of this fact. As indispensable partner to the company, they help us every day and have become an important asset to Lengow. Kima knows how grateful we are to them, but we’ll say it again: Thank you.

Thank you …

It’s difficult to sufficiently thank everyone for the precious help and support we receive every day. It’s really important to us.

First of all, and once again, thank you to all the members of the Lengow team, relentlessly hard-working and with whom it’s a pleasure to work day in and day out. They deserve the utmost respect!

We’d also liked to thank our clients, who trust us every day with the management of their product catalogues. Your trust is our driving force.

On the other side of the feed, we have to thank all our partners who are also very important to us and who, for the most part, haven’t hesitated to follow us and give us their confidence since the beginning.

As you know, Lengow is a company based in Nantes, France. For the past 15 months, we’ve been welcomed like kings by the web world in Nantes, which is clearly one of the best web company pools in France, after Paris. Almost like a second family, they’ve given us so much and we could never thank them enough!

A huge thank you to Julien, Jérémie, Vincent, François, Adrien, Magalie, Guillaume, Floran, Béné and all the others we’ve forgotten, don’t hold it against us, you guys are awesome!!

And finally, of course we have to thank our respective families and faithful friends, for whom daily life isn’t easy when you drink/eat/sleep Lengow!

Thank you for all your support, we’re doing this for you too!

We’ll meet again next year for number 3 of our annual reports! But don’t worry; you’ll continue to hear about us until then!

Jérémie, Mickael and all the Lengow Team

Since the creation of the solution, Lengow has allowed its online retailers to choose the exact hour and minute at which we update the indexation of their product catalogues.

The merchant chooses these times himself, and each e-commerce site has its own policy regarding catalogue updates.

As an extra feature, we have launched a new tool which automatically adjusts the indexation time of the merchant’s source catalogue to the best possible hour so that the distributor receives a fresh feed that’s 100% up-to-date.

If the comparison shopping site comes to retrieve the e-tailer’s feed at 10:45 pm, we’ll calibrate an indexation of the source feed at 10:15 pm, which will be done automatically!

With this new tool, we’re going to extra mile to help merchants provide a completely optimized and updated feed to the different channels on which they’re listing.

Lengow currently indexes more than 35 million products and more than 6,700 feeds every day.

FeedBanner: a simple tool to generate banner ads

FeedBanner allows you to create banner ads automatically thanks to your product catalogue.

You can create a product banner quickly and easily directly from one of your Lengow feeds. You can create thematic banners around a category of products in just few clicks. For example, offer your affiliates banners based on headphones!

Choose a product or a category and automatically generate a banner available in several standard sizes (skyscraper, square, simple banner, etc.).

The product information will automatically be displayed on the banner!

You can then modify the design of your banner in order to customize it to the colours of your online store:

The only thing left to do is to copy the HTML code of your banner in order to enter it in your favourite Adserver, such as OpenX or Affiz.

HTML Code of your banner:

This new functionality is now available within the Lengow solution and is completely free for our e-tailers!

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Here are a few examples of some banners created using FeedBanner:

Had enough of all those tags?
Would you like to centralize the management of your partner tags?

Use TagCapsule to centralize the complete management of all your trackers!

Thanks to this universal tracker, you no longer have to worry about whether your tag has been correctly placed, if it works properly or if it’s going to clash with other tags.

TagCapsule enables you to place one unique tag on the pages of your website and then distribute the trackers which you have selected within your account.

A unique tracker!

Lengow puts at your disposal a unique tracker which encapsulates all trackers of your partners in the solution. You now only have one tag to manage!

Gone are the days of multiple tags on your website. TagCapsule takes care of centralizing them all within one unique tag to make your life easier!

Complete independence

You no longer have to call upon your technical team to set up tags! You can manage them all by yourself from a simple interface.

You choose which trackers you’d like to encapsulate, and TagCapsule takes care of distributing these trackers with each display.

A time saver

Instead of being weighed down by several trackers, the pages of your website will now include just one tag!

You will therefore save a considerable amount of time when loading your pages.

A complete bank of trackers

TagCapsule has about 20 trackers in its data bank, with many more to come!

Launched last month, the universal tag TagCapsule enables e-tailers to centralize the management of 20 trackers within one unique universal tracker.

Thanks to this universal tracker, you no longer have to worry about whether if this or that tag has been correctly placed, if it works properly or if it’s going to clash with other tags.

TagCapsule allows you to place just one unique tracker on the pages of your e-commerce store and then distribute the selected trackers within the TagCapsule back office.

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TagCapsule now integrates trackers from Criteo, the leader in retargeting.

The integration of these trackers is thus easier for e-tailers wanting to work with Criteo.

In a matter of minutes, the trackers can be installed on the different types of the e-commerce site’s pages.

Thanks to TagCapsule, e-tailers can rapidly use Criteo’s services in order to develop their visibility and internet sales.

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Personalized Retargeting by Criteo

While they’re browsing your website, Criteo tags each one of your potential customers with an anonymous cookie. This cookie allows information to be collected regarding your visitors’ navigation data, such as the pages they’ve visited and, in some case, the products they’ve purchased.

As soon as they leave your website to navigate other pages, Criteo finds your visitors and retargets them with unique personalized banners ads featuring product recommendations based on their browsing history on your website.

Each Criteo banner is generated in real-time, optimizing the placement and display in order to achieve the highest click-through rate (CTR).  Criteo’s dynamic banner ads bring ready-to-buy shoppers back to your website to complete their transactions.