The French ad-tech company Pubstack said Wednesday it raised $2.3 million in seed funding from two VC firms and a handful of angel investors, including Criteo co-founder Romain Niccoli.
Pubstack’s tech is designed to make it easier for publishers to monitor their programmatic partners in real time, and it connects monetization data with what happened during a user session.
This information is hard to pull together without a tool like Pubstack, due to siloed tech stacks and header bidding.
“The publisher stack is more complex than ever before,” said Pubstack co-founder Loïc Sfiligoi. “As publishers move from direct sales to programmatic sales, they need to make better, faster decisions.”
Pubstack will use the seed funds to grow from five to 15 employees by the end of the year, and it will expand its product offering in two key areas.
First, Pubstack plans to add an alerting tool that will notify publishers when revenue drops.
Second, Pubstack will add new ad quality metrics so publishers can better understand their site, including time of exposure and ad placement viewability.
Pubstack has attracted major French publishers including Webedia (AlloCiné, JeuxVideo.com), Adverline (La Poste), CCM Benchmark (Figaro Group) and M6. It’s now pitching other publishers in the European market.
Pubstack charges a software-as-a-service fee for its product. “We don’t like the revenue sharing model,” Sfiligoi said.
Other vendors that help publishers unify their analytics include Roxot, which is Pubstack’s closest peer according to Sfiligoi. Other publisher analytics companies include Ad-Juster, Assertive Yield, Staq , Adomik and Google Analytics. Pubstack also competes with publishers’ homegrown solutions.
But unlike those other vendors, Pubstack claims its solutions operate in real time and marry disparate data sources, including header bidding partners, ad server data and user behavior.
Pubstack can also calculate metrics like revenue per user session, which helps identify high-value users or ad experiences that are lengthening (or shortening) a visit to a site.
Publishers can use Pubstack to answer questions like: “How well is my audience monetizing in Belgium?” or “Am I blacklisted by a DSP?” or “How much money am I losing because of timeouts?”
Pubstack can also run A/B testing of partners, enabling publishers to find out if adding a partner brings incremental value to their setup. Too many publishers are “flying blind” and “struggling to measure the impact of their actions,” Sfiligoi said – and Pubstack is giving them the visibility they need to run their programmatic businesses.
