Tom Cuthbert

January 24, 2013

Ad Analytics Firm Adometry Raises $8M Series D, Led By Shasta Ventures

Tom Cuthbert

January 24, 2013

NATASHA LOMAS

Ad analytics company Adometry, the combined entity created when Click Forensics acquired Adometry and kept its branding, has announced it has closed an $8 million Series D round, led by Shasta Ventures, with Austin Ventures and Sierra Ventures also participating. As part of the funding round, Shasta Venture’s MD, Jason Pressman, will join Adometry’s Board of Directors.

The company said it plans to use its latest funding to accelerate product development on its analytics platform, Adometry Attribute, as well as recruit staff and expand into new territories. It currently says it processes and analyzes “tens-of-billions of impressions and advertising transactions” per month on behalf of its customers.

Adometry sells tools to help advertisers and marketers determine how cross-channel media campaigns are performing and identify ways they can be optimized. Its approach to measuring campaign effectiveness involves aggregating data from multiple sources and signals, rather than just identifying the “last click” and giving that all the credit for the purchase.

Here’s how the company explains its analytics platform on its website:

Adometry Attribute uses a “data-driven,” probabilistic approach to determine what should receive the credit. Adometry identifies every conversion and “look-back” over the previous time period to find all the touch-points that user saw prior to the conversion. It then determines the probability of each conversion sequence – with and without an event – and then uses the ratio to determine the importance of the omitted event.

Advanced Attribution offers a number of benefits when compared to simple attribution models. To start, Attribute takes into account any and all available data streams, and analyzes all data instead of sample sets, yielding a highly accurate and insightful model for marketers to judge their marketing efforts by. Attribute is also integrated with numerous data providers and pulls additional third party data for increased accuracy, scalable marketing analytics and reporting depth that allows for truly actionable insights to be uncovered.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Shasta’s Pressman said: “We believe Adometry has built a unique and sustainable business at the intersection of several exploding market dynamics. Using big data to optimize and influence advertising spend is the future of marketing, and many of the world’s largest brands already rely on Adometry’s robust platform and expertise. We are thrilled to lead this round of funding and excited about Adometry’s continued growth and success.”

Adometry’s full release follows below.

ADOMETRY RAISES $8 MILLION IN LATEST ROUND OF FINANCING
Funding to Fuel New Products and Expansion into New Geographies

AUSTIN, Texas – January 21, 2013 – Adometry, Inc., a leader in cross-channel attribution, today announced that it has completed an $8 million round of financing. The company will use the funds to accelerate its product roadmap, recruit top talent and expand into new territories.

The financing was led by Shasta Ventures and includes participation from Austin Ventures and Sierra Ventures. Adometry also announced Shasta Venture’s Jason Pressman will join Adometry’s Board of Directors.

As a result of the funding, the company plans to accelerate product development on its Adometry Attribute^™ platform, which provides marketers with acomprehensive lens through which to analyze and optimize the performance of their cross-channel marketing campaigns. Through unique integrations with leading programmatic buying platforms, advertisers can also automatically funnel performance data and optimization recommendations from Adometry’s platform to real-time bidding engines to optimize media and channel investments for active campaigns.

“Our focus has always been to deliver the best possible products for advertisers so that our customers and agency partners around the world are better able to understand and make decisions about their marketing spend,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry. “We are humbled by the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve received thus far and look forward to delivering even greater value through our Attribute platform by offering new capabilities and features in the coming year.”

“We believe Adometry has built a unique and sustainable business at the intersection of several exploding market dynamics,” said Jason Pressman, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures. “Using big data to optimize and influence advertising spend is the future of marketing, and many of the world’s largest brands already rely on Adometry’s robust platform and expertise. We are thrilled to lead this round of funding and excited about Adometry’s continued growth and success.”

For more information on Adometry, visit www.adometry.com or follow us on Twitter: @Adometry.

About Adometry

Adometry, Inc. redefines marketing analytics by combining and interpreting previously silo-ed sources of big data to generate actions that improve return on advertising spend and increase sales. Through its SaaS-based attribution platform, Adometry processes tens-of-billions of marketing touch points from online and offline media channels for some of the world’s largest advertisers to identify the true consumer purchase journey. Adometry’s scientifically proven methodology and flexible, easy-to-implement solution generates the industry’s most accurate insights, in the shortest amount of time. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information, visit www.adometry.com.

Tom Cuthbert

June 28, 2012

Is Click Fraud A Ticking Time Bomb Under Google?

Tom Cuthbert

June 28, 2012

Clem Chambers, Contributor

It was a long time ago when Google enjoyed the reputation for being the “do no evil” un-corporation.

The studied PR that created Google’s reputation as the coolest corporation ever has slowly eroded away.

After years of using Google as the window on the Internet people have begun to realize Google knows more about them than they know about themselves. The penny has dropped that all is not well–you go to a humor site and Google serves an ad about a subject you’d surfed in the past and realize Google is targeting you.

The famous “creepy line,” espoused by their ex-CEO has become clearer and scarier to many as their Internet sophistication has increased and it is making people nervous.

Videoing your door step with a roving camera car was a turning point for Google’s reputation. Only the most innocent amongst us felt this was a benefit. The latest generation of burglars thought it was great, but it was a violation of privacy that set off Google’s reputation slide.

Google once owned the hearts and minds of the Internet but it was the ripping of open, private Wi-Fi connections by its camera car that set off Google’s fall from grace.

You have to be very forgiving to see this as a simply mistake. As forgiving as the British government are, they were still shocked to discover that the explanation given to the U.S. Feds was both different and more sinister than the innocuous one they got from Google and accepted.

With its engineer reportedly taking the Fifth amendment, the once saintly Google seems to have donned a more sinister cowl.

Yet these outrages are as nothing to the real bomb threatening to nuke Google. War dialing is just the tip of the iceberg.

At the last count (December 2011) Google had sales of $38 billion USD. This is a colossal sum of money with the bulk (96%) of this cash coming from advertising. This revenue comes from AdWords/AdSence. To put this sum into perspective, per year it is about $100 for every U.S. citizen and a week or two of the U.S. national deficit.

A large proportion of this money, $10 billion, comes from advertising Google places on third party Web sites. You can start a Web site, put your content on it and place Google AdSence ads on it and start earning money right away. It’s the spigot of money many Web sites rely on to stay in business.

Google has a monopoly on this, at least as far as the definition goes by the regulators that define them. In any event, Google is the $39 billion gorilla in this business and $10 billion of third party advertising is a lot of money.

Click fraud is the ticking bomb. It is also a term I was unable to find in Google’s recent year end statement but it exists, Google won’t deny that. Apparently Google click fraud is less than 2%, whilst Click Forensics says overall it was 19% in 2010.

You can Google the numbers yourself and they are astounding.

So let’s forget the percentage of click fraud on Google search engine because whilst it’s still fraud and it is nasty only Google is making billions from it. Let’s instead focus on the Google network of third party sites.

Google thinks that click fraud is 2%, that’s $200,000,000 of third party Web site fraud. This is a huge theft from advertisers everywhere. $200,000,000 is drug baron scale criminality.

Put another way, by that calculation the yearly carve up of this ill-gotten loot is $101 million dollars a year to criminals and $99 million to Google.

But wait, what if it is the 19% Click Forensics say? That is a $1 billion dollars hit for criminals. This is a Madoff or Stanford scale scam. Who are these criminals earning a billion dollars in click fraud?

A quick Google search reveals that at Christmas the FBI busted a single outfit that was generating $14 million from click fraud. In this case they were Estonians and Russians. Then there was the case of Android apps infected with click fraud bots in China, it doesn’t take long to realize that criminals from around the world have been draw to this ocean of money like flies to honey.

In the old days, when butter wouldn’t melt in Google’s mouth, being the platform for hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud didn’t seem to attract anyone’s attention. But with Google now at war on many fronts with regulators around the globe, cookies, unfair competition and war dialing the knives are out.

When they ask about click fraud and start wondering about the kinds of people around the world enriching themselves with illegally gained income it will open up a can of worms for Google they will find hard to close.

The governments of the west have tried hard to keep criminal cash out of the financial system so that terrorists, drugs and mafia kingpins find it hard to launder their money. It is hard to get criminal cash turned into bank balances, click fraud gains however go straight into the financial system without touching the sides.

This billion dollar money laundering short circuit is not just a concern for those in authority, it is a magnet from those looking for illicit gains that come ready laundered.

It’s the perfect crime and as the news flow underlines–it’s organized.

Google is a mammoth company, with an income torn from old media who are failing under the onslaught of a World Wide Web that Google effectively controls. Click fraud is the dirty secret of the Web and while it’s extent is kept under wraps and its scale unacknowledged, it will remain a ticking bomb under all the search engines, and as the king of the hill, Google’s in particular.

Clem Chambers is CEO of leading financial markets Web site ADVFN.comand author of 101 Ways to Pick Stock Market Winners or A Beginners Guide to Value Investing now out on Kindle.

Tom Cuthbert

March 23, 2011

Adometry First Ad Verification and Attribution Provider Certified for Google Display Network

Tom Cuthbert

March 23, 2011

Today at the OMMA Metrics conference, Adometry (formerly Click Forensics, Inc.), the leading provider of ad analytics, announced that it is the first ad verification and attribution vendor certified by Google to provide campaign verification and effectiveness measurement across the Google Display Network (GDN) for ad inventory bought through Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Google had not previously allowed third-party verification across GDN inventory, only recently approving the use of DoubleVerify, a point solution for monitoring brand safety. Now, by including the Adometry tag on their ad campaigns, advertisers buying GDN inventory through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange have a more robust solution for audience verification, attribution, and campaign effectiveness measurement.

Adometry Validate provides more than simple brand safety capabilities, including:

Moves beyond monitoring of inappropriate content to provide verification of entire campaigns, including effectiveness, reach & frequency, and demographic targeting
Reports are delivered in real-time via a browser-based interface, rather than through weekly spreadsheets
Unlike other offerings that only verify samples of a campaign, Adometry verifies 100% of ad impressions

Adometry Validate is the core module of the Adometry Ad Analytics suite, which has processed billions of clicks and impressions for dozens of the world’s largest advertisers and ad networks. Adometry Ad Analytics combines ad verification, dynamic attribution and campaign optimization in a tightly integrated platform, giving advertisers a comprehensive way to measure and manage campaigns across the entire online advertising ecosystem.

“Verifying brand safety alone is not enough,” said Steve O’Brien, vice president of Marketing at Adometry. “Transparency in the online ad exchange world is about more than just verifying the content of sites where ads are served. Advertisers need to know which campaign attributes are working and why, in order to make adjustments to maximize ROI.”

Since 2006, Adometry has delivered cross-platform ad campaign measurement and optimization solutions for top online advertisers, publishers and ad networks in the display and cost-per-click advertising markets. Each month, the company processes billions of ad impressions, which it uses to refine and develop sophisticated machine-learning algorithms that track and enhance ad campaign performance and effectiveness. The company’s SaaS offerings are ideally suited to meet the scalability and performance demands of real-time online advertising campaign management.

For more information on Adometry, visit www.adometry.com or follow us on Twitter @Adometry.

Tom Cuthbert

March 1, 2011

Hello Adometry!

Tom Cuthbert

March 1, 2011

Click Forensics Acquires Adometry; Adopts New Company Name

Now Adometry, Company Continues Expansion Into Online Display Ad Verification and Attribution

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Click Forensics®, Inc. today announced that it has acquired display ad verification technology provider Adometry of Redmond, Washington. In addition, Click Forensics announced it has changed its company name to Adometry. The moves are designed to support the continued expansion of the Click Forensics product line for the display advertising market.

In February 2010, Click Forensics launched a beta version of its cross-channel ad analytics suite for online display advertisers, which was tested by some of the world’s top brands and ad inventory providers. The integrated offering is designed to help advertisers, agencies, ad networks and publishers to manage audience verification attribution and campaign optimization through a single platform.

“The key challenge online marketers face today is accurately measuring and improving the performance of their online ad campaigns as they flow across a changing landscape of ad networks and web sites,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics and the new Adometry. “With the addition of ad verification technology from Adometry, our ad analytics suite integrates all the pieces of display campaign measurement and optimization in a single offering for brand advertisers.”

Over the past year, Click Forensics has continued to build out its technology offerings for display advertisers. The solution suite, which helps brands measure and improve the performance of their online display campaigns, complements Click Forensics ad analytics technology for PPC marketers. Online marketers can also use the two offerings together to manage their hybrid display and PPC campaigns.

“We’re excited to join forces with the Click Forensics team,” said John Dietz, founder of Adometry. “The company works with the world’s top online advertisers, publishers and ad networks. Our technology will enhance the current capabilities Click Forensics provides to display advertisers as we work together to build out new features for its powerful ad analytics suite.”

For more information, visit www.adometry.com or follow us on Twitter: @Adometry.

About Adometry, Inc.

Adometry, formerly Click Forensics, Inc., provides scoring, auditing, verification, and attribution metrics to optimize results for online advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad networks. Tracking billions of impressions in real-time, reporting on where they appeared, for how long, and to what effect; the Adometry mission is to bring greater levels of transparency and accountability to the online advertising industry. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information visit www.adometry.com.

Select media coverage:

Ad Analytics Firm Adometry Raises $8M Series D, Led By Shasta Ventures

NATASHA LOMAS

Is Click Fraud A Ticking Time Bomb Under Google?

Adometry First Ad Verification and Attribution Provider Certified for Google Display Network

Hello Adometry!

Click Forensics Acquires, Becomes Adometry And Launches Ad Analytics Suite

Click Forensics is now Adometry

Click Forensics is now Adometry

Click Forensics Takes Adometry's Name With Its Tech

Click Forensics makes acquisition

Click Forensics Acquires Adometry; Adopts New Company Name

Click Forensics acquires Washington firm

Adometry Acquired By Click Forensics