London, 13th October 2014 - Empello, a provider of compliance support and ad monitoring for mobile operators and payment providers, has today announced a major leap forward in its ad monitoring capabilities. The new ‘Guardian’ technology provides Empello with vastly increased scanning and ad discovery capabilities.

Empello’s Guardian is an automated robot which looks for websites containing specific types of adverts, e.g. premium SMS, mobile-billed services, and other products which are monetised via mobile payments.

For each site located, the robot automatically follows advertising links and captures a series of screenshots as well as every single URL from the end-to-end consumer journey. This tracks to see whether the affiliate marketing is misleading or not. While affiliate marketing can work well to attract new customers, misleading affiliate marketing can damage brand value and even lead to heavy fines from regulators.

“We have a great and growing sector that could potentially be damaged by a few bad affiliate marketing apples. Our new Guardian technology allows us to find and remove those bad apples,” said Jeremy Flynn, Director at Empello. “Now our clients can continue to grow their market with affiliate marketing in confidence.”

Using Guardian Empello scans the web for non-compliant or misleading affiliate marketing, recording screenshots and URL details so action can be taken where necessary. So clients can harness the benefits of affiliate marketing, whilst minimising the risks.

Guardian does this by emulating a human using a real mobile, tablet or desktop device in a specific country on either a Wi-Fi or 3G/4G network. The target website and advertising network is unable to know the difference, since Guardian appears for all intents and purposes to be a real user.

In the battle against misleading Affiliate Marketing, Empello can now scan thousands of digital marketing placements every day, employing its Guardian technology. Furthermore, new or changed sites can be quickly reviewed, and the resulting analysis processed by human analysts where non-compliance or other issues are detected.

Having invested heavily in this technology, Empello is pleased to continue providing its clients the best possible compliance support and advertising monitoring.