Connexity Acquires Hitwise from Experian

Digital marketing company Connexity has acquired Hitwise, a provider of large-scale online clickstream data collection and consumer behavioral analytics, from Experian. Hitwise will operate as a division within Connexity, formerly known as Shopzilla.

Hitwise's broad, audience-based insights into consumer online behavioral trends bolsters Connexity's offering to help companies understand, reach, and acquire target customers. Hitwise's recently launched audience segmentation and behavioral analytics platform, AudienceView, provides companies with a comprehensive view of demographic- and psychographic-enriched behavioral insights on their target consumers, including visibility into behavior patterns by device type, such as mobile phones.

"Hitwise's shift from Web site analytics to audience-based analytics aligns perfectly with our audience activation approach at Connexity, which is focused on delivering highly-targeted audiences created from our expansive shopping network," said Bill Glass, CEO of Connexity, in a statement. "The combination of AudienceView's clickstream and panel-based data with Connexity's programmatic audience targeting will enable our customers to research, understand, and identify their target audiences and their behaviors, and eventually, in the same interface, activate those audiences."

Once fully integrated with Connexity, retailers could, for example, use AudienceView to compare the demographics, preferences, and Web behavior of customers who shop at their physical stores, to the customers who shop online, and then use that data to rethink their ad creative, update their media planning, and then execute a campaign from the same interface.

"Adding Hitwise extends the services we provide to retailers, marketers and agencies," Glass added. "With AudienceView we help them simplify the process of identifying their customers, segmenting them and then activating them with media."

This acquisition is Connexity's fourth in less than two years.

In a simultaneous transaction, Connexity's private equity parent, Symphony Technology Group, acquired Experian's Simmons division, the publisher of the National Consumer Study (NCS), a world-class syndicated consumer research database, The Simmons NCS provide critical marketing information, including detailed usage information on more than 8,000 brands across 500 product categories.

Simmons and Hitwise operate today under the combined entity called Experian Consumer Insights. The two business lines will continue to operate as a combined entity, though Connexity and Symphony will seek to separate the two properties over the course of 2016.

Terms of the two transactions in aggregate were $47 million, plus up to $5 million based on an earn out.

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