LinkedIn — the social network for people looking to connect with others in their professional fields and find work with upwards of 810 million users — has a long-standing business in marketing and advertising on its own platform; today it is announcing an acquisition that could points to its ambitions to provide more analytics and insights across the wider internet. The Microsoft-owned networking platform has acquired Oribi, a Tel Aviv startup that specializes in marketing attribution technology. The deal will see LinkedIn establish its first office in Israel.
The deal is interesting on two levels. First, it’s signal of LinkedIn continuing to invest in its marketing and advertising services, an area that is growing at a fast clip for the company. Chief product officer Tomer Cohen noted in the blog post today that marketing services revenues have grown 43% year-over-year.
Second, the acquisition of Oribi specifically points to a sea change in what LinkedIn is setting out to do in marketing. Oribi’s mission — as we have described previously — has been to democratize web analytics.
“A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,” Iris Shoor told TechCrunch previously.
“Through the integration of Oribi’s technology into our marketing solutions platform, our customers will benefit from enhanced campaign attribution to optimize the ROI of their advertising strategies,” Cohen wrote today. “This means that our customers will be able to more easily measure website conversions with automated tags and code-free technology, as well as build more effective audiences, all in a way that is privacy-first by design.”
