Affiliate marketing specialist Impact Radius has taken the ad fraud fight into its own hands, acquiring automated traffic detection company Forensiq.
According to IAB estimates, ad fraud costs Impact Radius’s domestic US market $8.2 billion a year, so there’s a strong demand for services offering total transparency over media buying.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the purchase comes less than a week after Impact Radius announced a $30 million round of funding, which was earmarked for global expansion and product development.
The deal for Forensiq appears to form part of the latter strategy, with Impact Radius also claiming an industry-first in directly integrating the ad fraud detection specialist into its platform.
Unpolluted view
Through leveraging Forensiq’s technology, Impact Radius can gain an “unpolluted” view of campaign performance and consumer journeys, no longer relying on data “riddled” with ad fraud.
Forensiq discounts online click and conversion fraud as a result of analysing signals from over four trillion monthly events across desktop and mobile devices. Founded in New York, the group currently has offices in Silicon Valley and London, and has been lauded for uncovering a type of ad fraud, coined “mobile device hijacking”, where an official-looking app runs on a device’s background rapidly serving ads.
Following the purchase, Impact Radius will be able to pioneer the digital currencies of “attribution, viewability and ad fraud”, according to the group’s CEO, Per Pettersen.
Providing his own words on the deal, Forensiq’s founder and CEO David Senoff said he was “thrilled” to be joining Impact Radius in the ongoing fight against ad fraud.
“We believe in a world where advertisers can focus on improving ROI, and not have to worry about eliminating fraud from the equation.
“Our automated and seamless solutions allow advertisers to maximise the impact of every dollar spent.”
