Partners with Click Forensics for Real-time Scoring & Filtering of Online Advertising Traffic
AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc., the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community, entered into a click filtering and traffic quality scoring arrangement with Affinity, a fast-growing text-based advertising platform. Affinity will use Click Forensics services for all of its advertisers, publishers and partners. Affinity is the latest in a series of large online advertising networks adopting an independent 3rd party real-time click filtering platform to combat click fraud.
“We have now fortified our internal defense system with Click Forensics to provide advertisers better value for their advertising budgets. Advertisers are now confident that we will only charge them for clicks validated by an independent third-party source,” said Namit Merchant, President – Affinity. “We also benefit from their specialization as they aggregate data from multiple ad networks, which makes them an expert at the game.”
The Click Forensics traffic quality management platform allows ad networks, online advertisers, agencies and publishers to protect themselves against poor quality traffic, while targeting and delivering traffic sources that are more likely to convert into sales. For Affinity, Click Forensics will help better manage traffic from publishers by providing a score for every paid click, which indicates the likely conversion rate of traffic sources. Click Forensics will also allow Affinity to perform instantaneous filtering of invalid traffic and fraud, including publisher collusion fraud, which occurs when online publishers use rotating IP-addresses or botnets to click ads on their own sites in order to generate inflated commissions from unprotected ad networks.
“In addition to click filtering, the Click Forensics scoring technology will allow us to discount advertiser bid prices based on varying publisher quality levels. Advertisers will now have access to quality scores for each traffic source, resulting in more transparency and efficient spending of advertising dollars,” added Namit Merchant.
“Affinity has made traffic quality management a number one priority for its business, so they performed a careful evaluation of all available solutions,” said Steve O’Brien, vice president of marketing for Click Forensics. “As a result, we are excited to be selected by Affinity to help grow its business even faster and more profitably than ever before.”
The power of the Click Forensics traffic quality management platform is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of industry online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst traffic sources are flagged so advertisers, publishers and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns.
About Affinity
Affinity is a technology-driven online advertising company that provides high performance solutions for online publishers and advertisers. Affinity network of publishers consists of search engines, toolbars, domain parking sites, in-text ad units, contextual banners, comparison-shopping engines, local business sites, and other social media applications. Affinity’s flagship search monetization product delivers 10 billion ad impressions to 75,000+ advertisers, each month.
Affinity is an independently operated subsidiary of Hostway Corporation. Founded in 1998, Hostway is one of the world’s largest web hosting companies with a direct presence in 13 countries, 17 worldwide operation centers and more than 700 employees. Hostway provides web solutions to over 1.4 million web sites and 2 million customers worldwide. For more information about Affinity, visit www.affinity.com.
About Click Forensics, Inc.
Click Forensics is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Nextag, Infospace, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.
Click Forensics and Click Fraud Index are registered trademarks of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
