Four-year-old advertising technology company Clickable has secured a $12 million Series C funding round led by American Express to build out its Facebook ad platform.
The current round brings its funding to $32.5 million, and existing investors Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, FirstMark Capital, News Corp.'s chief digital officer Jon Miller and venture capitalist Peter Thiel are also contributing.
Clickable's platform is designed to let advertiser and agency clients monitor and manage their ads on Google, Bing and Facebook, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn, on a single dashboard. Some clients just buy the platform and implement it themselves, while others subscribe to Clickable's management services, which offers keyword review, account benchmarking and other add-on services. In particular, many advertising clients seek Clickable's guidance in managing their spending on Facebook, since they're frequently mystified by the social network's regular updates, according to Clickable's VP-marketing Max Kalehoff.
The company has had a partnership with American Express OPEN for the past year, focused on advertising for small- and medium-sized businesses. This past June, they launched YourBuzz, an online reputation-management platform geared toward local businesses with tools to monitor their presence across social networks and directories such as Bing, Citysearch, Facebook, Foursquare, Superpages, Twitter, Yahoo and Yelp.
The company will invest the new funding in product development and growing its sales and marketing team. There are currently 160 employees between its offices in New York City and Gurgaon, India.
"Social will be the biggest area of acceleration over the next 12 months," Mr. Kalehoff said, noting that Clickable has recently announced product developments around Facebook, including an ad builder enabling customers to create and launch 8,000 ads at the same time. It's designed for big advertising clients who might be looking to test and optimize a variety of ads.
"Facebook is relatively simple when you're first starting out, but once you start hitting scale is where it gets complicated," he said.
Clickable Direct has more than 1,000 clients, including the publishing house Hachette Book Group and Ann Taylor Loft, but partnerships with American Express OPEN, eBay and other pilot deals bring the total up, said Mr. Kalehoff.
