Most expe­ri­enced busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers are painful­ly aware that, even as inter­net adver­tis­ing rev­enue hits a record high at $20.1bn, whole swathes of that cash are des­tined for the toi­let because of fraud. But thanks to the ris­ing new real-time ad ana­lyt­ics start­up Pix­alate, fraud­sters are going to find it a good deal tougher to get away with their scams.

Fight­ing fraud and opti­miz­ing spend 

Found­ed in April last year, the com­pa­ny (which bills itself as “the most advanced and first real time ana­lyt­ic SaaS based plat­form for Online Adver­tis­ing”) has just announced that it’s raised a prince­ly $4.6m in a fund­ing round led by Javelin Ven­ture Partners.

Busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers wor­ried about the impact of fraud on online adver­tis­ing sales will quick­ly appre­ci­ate the virtues of Pixalate’s plat­form, which brings a whole new dimen­sion of trans­paren­cy to ad buy­ing. The San­ta Mon­i­ca-based start­up gath­ers vital per­for­mance infor­ma­tion on mobile and dis­play adver­tis­ing, help­ing buy­ers opti­mize their spend­ing and enhance their online mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. It can pro­vide com­par­isons of media buy­ing chan­nels, ad exchanges, DSPs and web­sites at a glance.

The company’s founder and CEO, Jalal Nasir, said:

“Adver­tis­ers want to invest more with their real-time bid­ding (RTB) media buys, but they are inhib­it­ed because there’s no trans­paren­cy into what inven­to­ry is being pur­chased. That, cou­pled with high fraud rates, seri­ous­ly con­strain spend. With Pix­alate, adver­tis­ers can now under­stand what they are buy­ing, detect fraud, and opti­mize spend all in real time.”

Wise advice

Informed esti­mates sug­gest that 38 per­cent of mobile ad inven­to­ry and 34 per­cent of online ad inven­to­ry is fraud­u­lent, so this is no mere side issue, as busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers would agree. The firm’s tech­no­log­i­cal wiz­ard­ly enables it to iden­ti­fy fraud from mal­ware, click farms, retar­get­ing bots and incen­tivized ad net­works and it wastes no time in alert­ing adver­tis­ers to any sus­pi­cious activ­i­ty. And it not only detects “ad waste” (ads that were served but not actu­al­ly seen), it can also tell when ads aren’t served at all, where­upon it noti­fies adver­tis­ers so that they can see if they’re being overcharged.

But haul­ing in data is one thing; know­ing what to do with it is anoth­er. Pixalate’s “AdWise­ly” tools come to the res­cue here, mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions to adver­tis­ers on what, specif­i­cal­ly, they need to do to make their cam­paigns more effective.