With its $42 million acquisition of the financial website Investopedia and a new plan to put its data to work for big digital ad campaigns, Westlake Village-based ValueClick is aiming to give its online display advertising business a big boost.

It’s an essential strategy, analysts say, because ValueClick faces aggressive competition in display ads from some of the tech sectors biggest players, including Google, Yahoo and even AOL and Facebook.

At 12 years old, ValueClick is a grizzled veteran of the online ad business. It also has one of the biggest independent networks of places to run an online ad, with the ability to reach 80 percent of the U.S. Internet audience at any given time. It serves up 1.3 billion impressions a day.

The full version of this article is only available in the print edition. To view everything the Business Times offers, see this week’s print version or SUBSCRIBE to the print edition for $49.99 today.