AdInsight Raises $2.6M From Eden Ventures For AdTech That Bridges Online And Offline Analytics

A lot of adtech startups have focused their attention on ways to improve the process of measuring, buying and delivering online ads, but here’s an example of a company getting some traction for a solution that to better sense of how a company’s online activities relate to what customers do to interact with the company offline: the UK-based AdInsight, which connects a user’s browsing history with how he then interacts with the company on a phone, has picked up £1.6 million ($2.6 million) in a Series A round from Eden Ventures.

The investment is the first round of funding for AdInsight, which has been around since 2008 and counts TUI Travel, Thomas Cook, RAC and British Gas among its customers.

While there has been a big drive to migrate customer service as much as possible to the web — innovations from companies like Twilio making it even easier to incorporate calling functions directly on to sites, for example — AdInsight’s approach is, in a way, more old school, in that it accepts that the majority of users are still going to be taking to their traditional phones to contact a company at the end of the day.

Ross Fobian, co-founder and CEO of AdInsight, notes that the company has seen “phenomenal expansion” over the last 18 months for what he calls the “missing link” between online marking and offline buying.

The company’s flagship product, AdInsight Clarity, works like this: a proprietary solution, in the form of a piece of Javascript, is attached to a company’s site and to individual ads to track what each visitor is doing on the web and then linking that activity up with individual users by assigning unique telephone numbers to each of them, for when they eventually pick up the phone to call the company.

By tracking what sites a person visited, and where he clicked, AdInsight can then offer data to companies about what online marketing has been effective (and what has not) to convert an online browser into an offline user of their services.

The company also offers a service where it attaches unique phone numbers to specific online ads — again so that companies can gauge how specific marketing activities are converting into (potentially more costly, but potentially more lucrative) phone calls.

AdInsight says that it also integrates Google’s Adsense and Adwords analytics into its reports so that companies can track that activity against call conversions, again tracking that back to specific visitors.

Richard Hamnett, the other co-founder and CTO of AdInsight says that the funding from Eden will be used to hire more staff, invest in infrastructure and continue its product development.