Excluding the company’s Market Intelligence (MI) division, revenue grew by 6.7% to £64.2m with like-for-like, constant currency revenue growth of 2.3%, up 5.5% in the second half of the year.

The company announced the planned sale of its Advertising Intelligence business to Nielsen in February 2018. Advertising Intelligence business represents over 90% of the reported revenue and underlying operating profit within the MI division.

Underlying operating profit was down on the year before (£12m in 2017 compared to £13m in 2016 ). Revenue from the company’s Marketing Performance Optimisation (MPO) division was down 2.3% compared to the previous year, a drop attributed to decline in revenue from the MPO’s US business.

Michael Karg, chief executive, Ebiquity, said: "While our financial performance was held back by disappointing results in the US, we achieved important milestones on our multi-year transformational journey. The underlying changes that we are driving throughout our business are designed to align our services with client-side trends which provide mid to long-term growth opportunities. 

"We are positioning Ebiquity to become the preferred, independent advisor to marketers at world-leading brands. We have a clear, focussed and differentiated destination and are implementing the relevant changes now and going forward."