In 2007, a startup called Click Forensics began operations in San Antonio.
The company, founded by Tom Cuthbert and Tom Charvet, tackled the problem of click fraud online. Austin Ventures provided its initial $500,000 seed stage funding.
Click Forensics ended up moving to Austin and pivoted to become a marketing analytics firm called Adometry.
On Tuesday, Google announced it bought Adometry for an undisclosed price. Since its inception, Adometry has raised $29.1 million in venture funding from Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures, according to the company.
Adometry and Google both announced the deal it in separate blog posts.
“Adometry is joining Google, where they will build on the momentum of our existing measurement and analytics offerings, which include Google Analytics Premium as well as other products,” according to a Google blog post.
“Attribution solutions, like Adometry’s, help businesses better understand the influence that different marketing tools — digital, offline, email, and more — have along their customers’ paths to purchase (http://goo.gl/tXTliw). This heightened understanding, in turn, enables businesses to measure marketing impact, allocate their resources more wisely, and provide people with ads and messages that they’re likely to care about.”
Adometry moved into new headquarters last year at the Lakewood Center Building II on Capital of Texas Highway and has about 135 employees, according to this profile Silicon Hills News did of the company in March.
“We couldn’t be more excited to join Google — a company that shares our core values. Not only do they focus on innovation and solving big problems, but also like Adometry, they seek to provide brands and their agency partners with the analytics and insights to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns,” Paul Pellman, Adometry’s CEO, wrote in a blog post on its site.
Tag: Click Forensics
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Paul Pellman, Adometry’s CEO and Casey Carey, chief marketing officer
“We have 110 people,” said Casey Carey, chief marketing officer. “We’ve doubled in a year and we probably will be at 150 by the end of this year. We have the first right of refusal on some additional space downstairs.”
What Adometry does, for clients like Lenovo, Hulu, Hyatt and Charles Schwab, is to analyze data from digital media ads like banner and display ads, email marketing campaigns, SEO, social media and other touchpoints as well as data from “top down” advertising like broadcast and print, analyzes it and creates dashboards so customers can know which ad dollars are producing the most return on investment.
The data from the “top down” advertisers comes from the same places it always did—audience demographics and other information that can’t be tracked to specific users. But the company also incorporates data that might influence the campaigns, like news events and economic changes. Each client is assigned an account manager, a data engineer, a data scientist and a business analyst. They’re all needed, Carey said, because “this is a really hard data management problem.”
“There’s a lot of disparate data and every company’s data is different. People get excited about the attribution (attributing revenue to a specific ad source) and the reports. And the hard part we don’t take a lot of credit for is all the data management. That’s one of the things we’ve learned over 70-plus clients. We’re mastering it, but it’s been a little bit of a journey because there’s new stuff coming up all the time. For example, nobody’s really doing this for Twitter. The big question on the table is how do you track users across devices?”Without cookies, which many mobile devices lack, data tracking is nearly impossible.
But the company faces another challenge, the challenge of the “new truth.” One of Adometry’s jobs is helping CEOs and advertising and marketing managers adjust their perceptions of what’s really bringing in the revenue after years of incorrect assumptions.
Adometry’s Austin roots began with a company called Click Forensics, founded by Tom Cuthbert and Tom Charvet in San Antonio. The company focused on reducing click fraud that burned up dollars spent on Google Adwords campaigns. The company started in 2007 and received $21 million from Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Shasta Ventures. By 2011, Google was tackling click fraud more aggressively internally and Click Forensics bought Adometry out of Redmond, Washington and launched its suite of online marketing analytics.
Adometry is focused, Carey said, on “companies who have a fairly large adspend and have access to a high-value conversion event.” But its ultimate destination is still up in the air.
Paul Pellman, Adometry’s CEO was serving as entrepreneur in residence for Austin Ventures when he was introduced to the company. He acknowledges that Austin loves its homegrown success stories like Home Away and Bazaarvoice. On the other hand, he said, Adometry is a venture company which is “looking to have a liquidity event. “
“One of two ways to have a liquidity event is either an acquisition by strategic buyers or going public and most are acquisitions. From a strategic standpoint, we’re solving a really important problem for marketers. We’ve put a great team in place and we want to keep accelerating that and let the liquidity take care of itself. “
Adometry, formerly Click Forensics, announced it has completed an $8 million round of financing.
The Austin-based company plans to use the money to develop products, recruit employees and expand into new markets.
Shasta Ventures led the financing round which included participation from Austin Ventures and Sierra Ventures. In addition, Shasta Venture’s Jason Pressman will join Adometry’s Board of Directors.
The company plans to further develop its Adometry Attribute™ platform, which provides marketers with analysis of the performance of their cross-channel marketing 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,” Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry, said in a news release.
Click Forensics, originally founded in San Antonio, bought Adometry in 2011 and changed its name.
