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. “
