B2B Marketing ROI

On October 25th, Omniture announced its acquisition of Visual Sciences for an estimated sum of $394 million. The deal will bring together two the top vendors in the online business optimization space, which has been growing at a breakneck pace over the last few years as businesses seek ways to measure the effectiveness of their online spending. Currently, marketers are faced with a lot of choice when it comes to online marketing tools, but many of these tools remain disparate and lack effective integration.

The Omniture-Visual Sciences deal is part of a larger trend of consolidation and “roll-up” within the web analytics industry. Even though Omniture and Visual Science have some overlap in terms of products (see their web analytics applications — duh), the acquisition will allow Omniture to add to its earnings and client base, as well as knock out a key competitor. For marketers, this means the appearance of more integrated solutions that can take care of a wide range of analytics needs. This consolidation leaves 800 lbs gorilla Omniture to compete with Webtrends and Core Metrics until it eats them up as well.

The real question is where do the roll-ups stop? My guess is that they will go all the way to the big guns like salesforce.com in the B2B space or Google in the B2C arena. What these mergers do show for now is that a lot of people are banking on the propensity of companies to look to manage all of their marketing vehicles from one centralized interface and eventually cast aside their current toolbox of disparate systems. Look to see more and more consolidation in the space as we move forward.

In case you are curious, here are some quick facts about the acquisition:

• Visual Sciences:
  • Founded in 1996 (originally WebSideStory)
  • Provider of analytics applications and analytics driven application
  • Offices in the U.S, Europe and Australia
  • Currently trading at 15.54 on Nasdaq
  • Total revenue for the year was 20.4 million, a 17% increase on year-over-year basis
  • Reported a net loss of .2 million dollars for Q2 2007, should break even in the next 2 or 3 quarters based on current trends
• Omniture:
  • Provides search marketing, marketing integration, and web analytics tools, as well as on-site behavioral targeting
  • Headquarters in Utah, additional national and international offices
  • Currently trading at 27.78 on Nasdaq
  • Some of its current offerings come from previous acquisitions (such as TouchClarity)
  • Will acquire Visual Sciences in a stock and cash transaction worth 394 million.
  • Q2 2007 revenue of 33 million, up 13% compared to the previous quarter
  • Reported a net loss of 4 million for Q2 2007, expecting a loss for Q4
  • Acquired Offermatica in September

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Web Analytics, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.