SEOmoz announced that it has acquired AudienceWise, as the latest in a spree of acquisitions kicked off by an $18 million round of funding the company received last year from The Foundry Group and Ignition Partners. Other acquisitions have included Followerwonk and GetListed.
“AudienceWise marks the culmination of our acquisition spree for this year,” SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin tells WebProNews. “Moving forward in 2013, our focus will be on accelerating our product roadmap and leveraging all the resources we’ve acquired over the last five months. The remainder of 2013 will be dedicated to putting our money where our mouth is: investing in our foundations, and ramping up our product offerings to SEOmoz’s 20,000+ users and our 300,000+ online community members.”
AudienceWise was a company specializing in audience development consulting for publishers and e-commerce sites, but its team will now be integrated into SEOmoz’s as a talent acquisition, though SEOmoz does say it will incorporate some of AudienceWise’s technical processes, strategy and products into the Moz toolkit.
“The main motivators for acquiring AudienceWise are the brains behind the operation, Matthew Brown and Tim Resnik,” says Fishkin. “Matt and Tim are joining Moz to help us scale our in-house marketing and grow our product expertise. Both have built software products in the past (Matt worked with Marshall on SearchCLU, Tim on an online poker subscription service) and have tremendous depth of knowledge in the fields of both inbound and paid marketing.”
“We have a lot of phenomenal talent at SEOmoz, but only a few of us are deep into the fields of SEO, social media, content marketing, email, CRO, etc.,” he adds. “Matt and Tim are here to help serve as mentors and as internal consultant experts to our entire team, a role that I’ve been far too busy to fill effectively over the last 18 months.”
From the sound of it, SEOmoz users have as much to gain from the deal as SEOmoz does.
“We believe that SEOmoz subscribers will benefit immensely from Matt and Tim’s expertise, which will improve how we build our products,” says Fishkin. “Tim is a Big Data junkie. He understands the enormous potential of both structured and unstructured data, as well as the challenges that come with harnessing and leveraging it across all segments of a business.”
“We know that Big Data matters to our users, and Tim’s vision will take us to the next level,” he continues. “Matt has worked in some of the toughest search marketing gigs, including The New York Times and at various Fortune 500 companies. Arguably, there is no tougher search marketing gig than publishing, where you live or die by clicks, and the competition grows daily. With this background, Matt knows what it takes to drive successful search marketing. His brain and willpower are going to help evolve SEOmoz’s product roadmap to meet the needs of our ever-growing user base.”
Exact terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the price was somewhere in the low seven-figure area.