Mercia EIS Funds

Mercia Fund Management announces first investment in Afternoonify

Innovative advertising audit tool PERCEPT becomes latest addition to MFM’s digital portfolio.

Mercia Fund Management (“MFM”), a leading technology investor with a focus on the Midlands, the North of England and Scotland, has completed its first SEIS investment into Afternoonify Ltd, the developer of an innovative automated digital advertising audit tool, PERCEPT, which offers cost cutting, actionable solutions for brands and advertising agencies.

Afternoonify Ltd will use the investment, which will total £425,000, to support the development of its core product, PERCEPT, ahead of a full commercial launch later this year.

PERCEPT automatically audits large-scale search accounts across a diverse range of industry standard Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”). This is a necessary part of any digital marketing strategy, as it allows agencies and brands to track and develop the use of best-practice account management across their Pay Per Click (“PPC”) ad spend.

Unlike existing audit solutions, PERCEPT is capable of tracking 100s of KPIs, such as: use of various bid strategies and targeting features; use of ad extensions; SEO factors on landing pages; spend efficiency; keyword conflicts; and duplication. PERCEPT is also able to aggregate and compare KPIs across multiple campaigns and markets, addressing the need for actionable insights at agency scale. Clients will be able to set targets for each KPI, specifying what they would like to achieve, as well as the minimum they expect. The software is also being developed to provide warnings when certain KPIs fall below these values.

According to an IAM/PwC report on Digital Ad spend, total expenditure on PPC is expected to grow globally to £38 billion by 2016. Paid search auditing represents a valuable niche for this market, but current in-depth solutions suffer from a lack of scalable automation & actionable reports, as well as high costs. PERCEPT solves these problems by offering a fully automated solution with fast and easily digestible results, useful for both media agencies and their brand clients.

This investment was led by Investment Manager Joshua Levy, who said:

“We are pleased to make our first investment into Afternoonify, which benefits from the strong leadership of Founder Tom Quick, who has over two decades’ experience in the digital media sector.

“The investment also underlines our commitment to build and support promising early stage start-ups, which then move through our Complete Capital Solution to become the next generation of potential emerging stars.”

Tom Quick, CEO and Founder of Afternoonify, said:

“We’re thrilled to be working with MFM, which has already been a great support in building our team and developing PERCEPT. MFM has a strong track record of funding and supporting digital start-ups, and I look forward to working with Josh and the team as PERCEPT enters the next stage of its growth journey.”