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Google Buys to Boost Confidence in Ad Metrics
Google announced on Friday that it had acquired Spider.io, whose advertising anti-fraud software should help the search giant in giving clients confidence in its ad metrics. Terms were not disclosed.
Spider.io was established three years ago and has built fraud detection technology which Google says it will use immediately in its video and display ads products, complementing its own existing efforts; and in the longer term to help scale up its efforts to 'weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem'. Bad actors are publishers selling ad space in a fraudulent way - and in a post on Google's DoubleClick Advertiser blog on Friday, VP Display Advertising Neal Mohan said that 'last year alone' the company had turned down 'millions of applications from sites looking to join our network because of suspected fraudulent activity'.
Google says its long-term goal is to 'give all parties a clearer, cleaner picture of what campaigns and media are truly delivering strong results', pointing to its introduction of the MRC-accredited ad viewability metric 17182>Active View, and commending industry efforts like the IAB's Traffic of Good Intent (TOGI) task force.
The acquired firm's web site is at www.spider.io but as of today is just displaying a link to the above blog entry.
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