Weeding out bot traffic the Big Data way, comScore makes first acquisition in years
Data science has proven an invaluable asset in identifying malicious activity on the corporate network, a benefit that comScore Inc. is looking to put in the hands of online marketers with the purchase of MdotLabs Inc., its first acquisition in three years. No financial terms were disclosed for the deal.
The Wisconsin-based startup, which spun out of a digital ad network operator called Broadcast Interactive Media LLC last year, has developed software that leverages a combination of signal processing and machine learning algorithms to accurately filter out non-human traffic, or NHT for short. In the past, that term was synonymous mainly with bot activities, but today it encompasses a much broader universe that also includes click farms, pay-per-view networks and a growing list of other artificial impression generation techniques.
The problem has gotten so out of hand that comScore estimates NHT now accounts for more than 50 percent of the hits any given advertising campaign receives. Besides posing a security challenge to web service operators, that also clouds marketers’ perception of audiences and makes it that much harder to effectively target consumers, an industry-wide issue that the digital measurement powerhouse’s hopes the purchase of MdotLabs.
Under the deal, the startup’s software will be fused into two of comScore’s more popular products: the Media Metrix visitor monitoring toolkit and the complementary validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) suite, a set of products for measuring campaign performance that was recently adopted by Yahoo! Inc. as part of its renewed efforts to step up its analytic game. The latter offering has long provided capabilities for detecting non-human traffic and other forms of ad fraud that will be complemented by the granularity MdotLabs brings to the table.
But as central as it may be, the technology is just one aspect of the transaction. The deal also buys comScore the startup’s team of data savvy professionals, among them co-founders Dr. Paul Barford and Timur Yarnall, a welcome boost as information becomes a more and more important part of decision-making for marketers.
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