Snap Inc, the camera and parent company of Snapchat, has acquired ad tech startup Metamarkets for under $100 million (£76 million) in a shake up to measure how it campaigns are performing, TechCrunch has reported.
Metamarkets, which has been around since 2010, provides marketers programmatic ad data-related services which includes a data dashboard to measure campaign performance, an API to import programmatic data into other apps and bid monitoring for exchanges.
The ad tech startup has raised around $58 million (£44 million) from investors, including True Ventures, Data Collective, AOL Ventures and more. Clients who currently use Metamarkets data tools range from Twitter and Oath, which serves as the umbrella company which also owns TechCrunch, Yahoo and AOL.
There’s been no official statement from Snap Inc nor Metamarkets but a TechCrunch source said the agreement between the two companies took place on October 24, 2017 – while another source claimed that the acquisition of Metamarkets for under $100 million was closed.
The merge continues to push Snapchat’s goal to enhance its advertising offering and become a key player in the social media industry, following a slow start to the year. The company recently updated its Ad Manager tool in August to help marketers better manage their advertising performance on the digital platform.
“Sophisticated targeting”
The latest merge follows on from Snapchat’s newly launched tool Snap Pixel, which allows advertisers to measure and track conversations across platforms and soon support more sophisticated targeting.
The tool aims to build on Snap’s performance marketing strategy, improving marketers’ connections between ads service within the app and website traffic, as well as letting brands measures attributes such as revenue, performance, growth and acquisition driven by Snapchat.
Last month saw Snapchat’s advertising spend grow by 55% as offline features such as Snap Map and geofilters enabled advertisers to understand and review how consumers shop online. With heavy competition from the likes of Instagram and other social platforms coming to light, Snap Inc is continuing to develop its marketing tools to help brands measure performance and monitor how users use the app.