Seattle’s Bizible Acquired by Marketo, A Strategic Touch Point

In the quest for more refined marketing attributions and accurate ROI’s, marketing automation leader Marketo has announced its biggest acquisition in history with the addition of  Bizible, a Puget Sound innovator in managing marketing performance.

As MarTech reported, “With the acquisition, two complementary, cutting-edge analytics and technologies have come together under one roof. Both technologies propel marketing efforts and enable organizations to link revenue and marketing ROI in a streamlined manner.”

The announcement was made during Marketo’s annual conference – Marketing Nation Summit. The financial terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed.

Steve Lucas, CEO of Marketo, shared, “This acquisition doubles down on Marketo and Bizible’s shared commitment to providing the most powerful, innovative, and robust marketing software that gives marketers the edge to win in the Engagement Economy. Together, our solutions create an industry-first platform for marketers to plan, engage, and measure by understanding what directly fuels ROI.”

To report on revenue, marketers turn to more advanced performance reporting, including multi-touch attribution. But even then, not all multi-touch revenue attribution reports show the same value.

Bizible’s Jordan Can points out that “When marketers started to feel the pressure to report on revenue, all the marketing automation vendors said that marketing-originated revenue was the metric that mattered. Coincidentally (or not), this was the only way marketing automation platforms (who understand the lead stage really well) could report on revenue.”

Google’s AdWords, for example, tracks touchpoints through conversion events (i.e., form fills), and works to attribute revenue to each of those conversions in order to prove value. If an AdWords ad led to a conversion in a buyer journey that eventually became a customer, 100% of the revenue is counted as marketing-influenced revenue. 

However, marketing-influenced revenue is not without flaws. If influence is confused for real attribution, it can drastically over-value marketing’s impact because it is susceptible to double- or triple-counting, or even more. If a buyer converted via AdWords, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and then became a customer for $100, each one of those channels would claim $100 in influenced revenue. Simply adding up the revenue from each channel, it would appear like marketing influenced $300, but the company only made $100 total from the efforts.

A more accurate way to report on marketing’s impact on revenue leverages multi-touch attribution to distribute partial credit to each effort that made an impact on the complete buyer journey. While there are many multi-touch models (and the model you use matters), this is by far the most accurate way to report on revenue.

Bizible’s  multi-touch attribution revenue reporting offers the ability to dig in to understand which exact efforts and elements of efforts contribute to revenue at a granular level. Marketers can confidently make decisions across the company about how to optimize and where to invest the next dollar. Because multi-touch attribution weights marketing’s contribution to revenue in context, this more credible measurement helps preserve the integrity of marketing budgets and decision-making.

Nancy Lim Rothman, director of marketing at CallRail had this to say about the acquisition: “Marketo is setting the precedent that powerful analytics are the key to future business success. By acquiring Bizible, Marketo is reinforcing the need for multi-touch attribution and understanding which marketing channels are contributing the most to the bottom line. Focusing on attribution and the touchpoints that need the most attention are important when converting buyers and optimizing ad budgets. Marketers need to understand what is truly driving leads and how they can improve the buyer journey, and focusing on the analytics behind their campaigns can help them get there.”