• by Shankar Gupta , September 12, 2005

Search engine marketing firm Fathom Online is expected today to announce a new data collection and tracking business, Fathom Data Solutions, which will market the company's ad data aggregation tool, dubbed Triton.

Triton collects data from a host of different sources, including search engines, tracking firms, and publisher networks, as well as other Internet companies. The product gathers data about every aspect of a client's ad campaign--from display ads to pay-per-click to pay-per-call--and consolidates them into a set of reports.

Fathom CEO Chris Churchill said that this business is aimed at companies that want to spend more dollars online, but don't have the manpower to monitor dozens of online campaigns at once. "We hear every single day that they're trying to put more money into this channel," he said. "Their biggest problem is that they want to scale, and the labor costs are too high."

Although Fathom's main field is search, this new business can track all kinds of online advertising, including e-mail, said Gregg Stewart, Fathom's senior vice president for channel management and marketing. "Any digital means by which [customers] can be brought into the system can be tracked," he said Gregg Stewart.

Fathom's product uses a number of different methods to collect the data it aggregates. For instance, search engines like Google and Yahoo! offer APIs that can be used to set up an automatic data delivery.

The Web-based tool, accessible from any computer, incorporates a number of permission levels, so that companies could arrange for the manager of a campaign to have greater access than lower-level employees to reports.

The tool currently delivers data for 26 active campaigns in a closed beta program for several of Fathom's largest marketer and ad agency clients.