Marketo this week said it would add significant capabilities for its customers to better attribute the results of work managed through its marketing automation platform through the acquisition of Bizible, while a partnership with Google will focus on bringing helping CMOs make better use artificial intelligence (AI).
Financial terms of the deal to buy Bizible were not disclosed. Marketo made the announcement Monday afternoon at its 2018 Marketing Nation Summit in San Francisco.
While Marketo’s marketing automation applications are widely used to help manage campaigns to drive demand generation and nurture leads, Bizible’s products help track the revenue and impact across all the various channels they use. In a recent interview to discuss the launch of its Bizible Discover product, for instance, the firm’s vice-president of product marketing Jenn Steele told B2B News Network there are too many CMOs and their teams struggling to get the proof points they need about their performance.
“(A lot of tools) base their attribution on incomplete data,” she said, “(For example, doing campaign attribution for sales activities rather than activity record-based attribution, or doing attribution without direct connections to ad networks.”
Research analysts and marketing industry executives were quick to praise Marketo for the acquisition and the additions to its portfolio.
Huge news at #MKTGnation… Marketo acquiring Bizible. Full attribution is the future of marketing reporting and Marketo diving deep into that market validates this. Will be interesting to see the future of the product now that it's under the MKTO umbrella.
— Andrew (Drew) Smith (@SmittyMarketing) April 30, 2018
Took a few media interviews about @marketo ‘s acquisition of @bizible today. MyPOV: every bizible customer I spoke with in the past loves the product. This is a great match! #marketing #attribution for revenue insight. #MKTGnation #CMO pic.twitter.com/YIm2eb4i2H
— Cindy Zhou (@cindy_zhou) May 1, 2018
You guys – Marketo + bizible is huuuuuuge news. This could be a pretty substantial wave in the lead gen space #ppcchat #fbadschat
— Evan Levy (@EvanLevy) April 30, 2018
Marketo said in a statement that customers will be able to connect to Bizible through the Marketo Engagement Platform, and that organizations who use marketing automation providers other than Marketo will continue to have access to the full range of Bizible solutions. There are still a few unanswered questions, of course, and not everyone was thrilled.
Will it still be a stand-alone product or rolled into @marketo ?
— Adam Helweh (@adamhelweh) May 1, 2018
https://twitter.com/AmritaGurney/status/991026628045279232
Meanwhile, those within Bizible’s social team can’t wait to collaborate:
https://twitter.com/bizible/status/991369292435238912
Marketo’s alliance with Google, meanwhile, will likely be focused on the use of AI to better segment audiences in marketing campaigns, the company said, using the search giant’s Google Cloud machine learning offering to manage information without needing to hire a data scientist.
