Mea­sur­ing the effec­tive­ness of native adver­tis­ing looks set to get more effi­cient as ana­lyt­ics start­up Sim­pleReach bags a huge Series A round.

Analy­sis and prediction

Job­bing busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers will know that for most clients, an ad’s capac­i­ty to dri­ve online adver­tis­ing sales is the bot­tom line. The cre­ative team’s native adver­tis­ing may be beau­ti­ful­ly sub­tle, the dis­plays pithy and snazzy, but agen­cies still need to be able to bring some­thing to the table these days to show how effec­tive they’ve been. That’s where NYC-based start­up Sim­pleReach comes in.

Found­ed in 2010, it raised $1.6 mil­lion in seed fund­ing in 2012 and has just closed a Series A round total­ing $9 mil­lion. Its tech­nol­o­gy not only tells clients how suc­cess­ful­ly their con­tent is going down on social media and pub­lish­er web­sites; it pre­dicts which native adver­tis­ing will real­ly take off, too. Every arti­cle gets a score rang­ing between 0 and 99 – an indi­ca­tor of how much social traf­fic it’ll bring to a client’s site. Agen­cies and mar­keters can then pro­mote those arti­cles through ads on Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, Nati­vo, Stum­ble­Upon, TripleLift and Outbrain.

If our job­bing busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er remains skep­ti­cal about SimpleReach’s capa­bil­i­ties, plen­ty of oth­ers aren’t. The plat­form is used by The New York Times, Forbes, The Atlantic and the Huff­in­g­ton Post to mea­sure their native ad pro­grams, while brands like Xerox and Intel use it to pro­mote and ana­lyze their con­tent marketing.

A tech­nol­o­gy whose day has come

But in the ear­ly days, before native adver­tis­ing had real­ly caught on, investors weren’t espe­cial­ly con­vinced there was a need for a com­pa­ny like Sim­pleReach. It’s co-founder and CEO Edward Kim con­cedes that it may have been “a lit­tle ear­ly to mar­ket.” Now, how­ev­er, the pic­ture looks very dif­fer­ent; before native took off, there was noth­ing to dis­trib­ute because it hadn’t yet been cre­at­ed, Kim says. Today it’s a total­ly dif­fer­ent ball game.

Kim asked TechCrunch jour­nal­ist Antho­ny Ha, “How many com­pa­nies today, and how many mar­keters today, have a blog?” Ha didn’t need to answer because Kim got in first: “hun­dreds of thou­sands.” What most of them lack, how­ev­er, is a dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­e­gy and any means of show­ing the return on their investment.

As Sim­pleReach does both, and very effec­tive­ly at that, it’s prov­ing pret­ty indis­pens­able four years after launch.