Search engine marketing firm Fathom Online today announced the launch of a new data solutions business unit aimed at helping online advertisers and agencies better manage their digital marketing campaigns.
Fathom Data Solutions will offer an automated data platform that will allow advertisers to integrate their sales, Website and affiliate data with more than 30 search engines, online publishers, and tracking and optimization companies. The platform, known as Triton, will integrate ad data and deliver the results daily to marketers’ desktops, giving them a dashboard view of their total online sales and marketing effort. The Web-based platform is intended to replace current practices, which involve manual data pulls from these disparate sources—a labor-intensive activity with limited scope and heavy risk of inaccuracy.
“As leaders in the search marketing space, Fathom realized that there’s a big problem out there that no one is solving,” said Mike Goos, vice president of product management and one of the developers of the Triton platform. “More and more marketing data is being generated, from search marketing, local search, rich media, contextual advertising and affiliate marketing, but no one is gathering it and integrating it correctly to make sense of it. The only way to do that is by automation.”
The new platform will collect and store data from the client marketer’s own weblogs, affiliate marketing programs, Web analytics and proprietary tracking systems. That data will then be linked with Google, Yahoo!, Miva, Ask Jeeves Interactive, MSN, Mediaplex, DoubleClick DART, and a large number of other tracking and media partners. This ability to link Web performance data with the client’s sales data will allow marketers a deeper look into how their ads and other promotional efforts are performing online.
“A lot of times, advertisers will be happy just knowing their click rate, conversion rate and cost per acquisition,” Goos said. “But what’s the next step after that? How do they know if that actually generated a sale? We’re capable of showing that, thanks to the architecture of the Triton system.”
The new business will help advertisers solve the twin problems of scalability/ optimization and efficiency, both in time and expense, said Chris Churchill, Fathom Online founder and CEO. “We’re bringing together three very disparate worlds. One is all the publishers buying and selling ads at auction; the second is the third-party optimization firms for optimization and bid management. The most important element we can integrate is the advertisers’ own data about what’s happening digitally at their own Web site.
Triton connects directly to the search engines and optimization partners via their application programming interfaces (APIs) and collects data 24 ours a day. It can also collect data via file transfer protocol (FTP), Excel, CSV files or manual pull if necessary.
The reports generated by the system can support the needs of media managers, finance executives and client services representatives. Media performance reports are delivered daily, but a monthly marketing budget report can give a detailed picture of marketing expenditures.
Fathom Data Solutions plans to sell the data integration service by monthly subscription, at a price of $3500 a month. The company says it already has pilot customers for the service and plans to make it generally available later this month.
