Google will scoop up Adometry, a marketing attribution firm whose product is designed to assign value to incremental media impressions.
Some industry watchers, like research firm Forrester, consider Adometry’s solution superior to Google’s home-grown technology. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Austin, Texas-based Adometry and its approximately 130 employees will eventually be incorporated into the Google Analytics Premium product. For now, the company will operate as a standalone subsidiary, Google said.
“Google Analytics Premium and its hundreds of customers will now have an additional set of tools to accomplish their business and marketing goals,” said a statement from Paul Muret, Google Analytics’ VP of engineering. Muret added Adometry’s team “will build on the momentum of our existing measurement and analytics offerings.”
In addition to Google Analytics, the Adometry solution may have applications within the DoubleClick stack.
Attribution solutions are designed to let the marketer determine the value of paid media impressions and other marketing “touchpoints” along the consumer path to purchase. In Forrester’s most recent Wave report on attribution vendors, the researcher gave high marks to Adometry and other specialists including Visual IQ, ClearSaleing, C3 Metrics and Convertro.
Meanwhile Google’s attribution solution was dinged by Forrester for being too, well, Google-centric. “We would recommend (Google’s) attribution tool only for marketers who use Google Analytics to track conversions and who also employ Google’s display advertising and search marketing tools,” said the report.
Google continues to receive feedback that its ad tech stack is too narcissistic, and there are signs it is becoming more responsive to those concerns. For instance, YouTube has lately opened the door to third-party research firms Nielsen and comScore in order to support audience measurement that is on par with industry-standard TV metrics. The acquisition of Adometry, which plugs into a wide range of ad-execution platforms including Videology, MediaMath, Advertising.com and Google’s own DoubleClick Bid manager could be another step toward “openness.”
Adometry’s data-driven approach has set it apart from some of its rivals.
Adometry CEO Paul Pellman told AdExchanger in a December 2012 interview,
“Folks that use simple predetermined rules could (integrate) various DSPs more easily. But to do it in a data-driven approach is really a challenge. The reason for that is, we’re providing this insight on a daily basis, which means we’re taking all of this data we’re collecting from our customers and we’re running attribution on a daily basis.
Running attribution with a data-driven approach is a big data processing challenge to begin with. When you start running it on a daily basis, that becomes even more difficult. You can’t provide this data on a weekly basis or on a monthly basis. You have to do it daily in order to be effective.”
The deal is Google’s first significant marketing tech acquisition in some time. After its 2011 acquisition of AdMeld, the company turned its attention inward, building out and integrating the various components of the DoubleClick ad tech stack. The only other deal in recent memory is Google’s February purchase of fraud-prevention startup spider.io. While that deal showed Google’s willingness to buy, spider.io only had about seven employees, which made the acquisition seem primarily talent-driven.
