Contact: Scott Denne
Recently divested eBay Enterprise sheds another asset as the former e-commerce unit of eBay sells ClearSaleing, its advertising attribution business, to Impact Radius. This is the second divestiture from eBay Enterprise since it was acquired by a syndicate of private equity firms in July. Last month, it sold its CRM division to Zeta Interactive.
Algorithmic attribution recently led Convertro, Adometry and MarketShare to substantial exits. Though ClearSaleing was far earlier to market than those companies, it has floundered since 2011 under the ownership of GSI Commerce (which was later acquired by eBay). Impact Radius offers a number of products for tracking marketing data and performance, including an attribution offering. With this deal, it adds algorithmic capabilities that enable it to forecast and model the combined impact of marketing and advertising spend across multiple channels.
Although algorithmic attribution has generated a great deal of interest, there are a number of roadblocks to the technology gaining widespread acceptance. The first is the technical challenge of gathering all of the necessary price and performance data across channels and linking those together via a combination of definitive and probabilistic linkages. The second is the cultural challenge of getting an entire marketing organization onboard with a new set of metrics – metrics that have potentially negative consequences for marketing divisions that were happy to gauge their success on narrow metrics such as last-click attribution and demographic reach.
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