Marin Software Acquires Retargeting Company Perfect Audience
Marin’s advertisers can now combine powerful intent data from search with retargeting and behavioral data from display and social on the first cross-channel, audience-based programmatic ad platformSan Francisco, CA – June 2, 2014 – Marin Software (NYSE:MRIN), provider of a leading Revenue Acquisition Management platform for advertisers and agencies, today announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based Perfect Audience, a privately held display and social retargeting company. Perfect Audience offers advertisers a powerful, easy-to-use SaaS platform to retarget audiences across the web, Facebook and Twitter. Under the terms of the agreement, Marin Software paid $22.8 million, comprised of approximately $5.4 million in cash and the remainder in common stock. In addition, Marin will grant $2.7 million of equity retention grants to continuing Perfect Audience employees. Marin completed the transaction on June 2, 2014.With the acquisition, Marin Software expands its cross-channel capabilities, adding new programmatic display and social advertising functions while strengthening its audience targeting tools. Real time search intent data will be combined with behavioral and other data sources to drive audience buying and retargeting across Facebook, Twitter, mobile, and other display ad placements. Additionally, Marin Software’s recently debuted support of Google’s Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) will now allow advertisers to use those same capabilities in search advertising. Marin Software is the only digital marketing platform to offer a unified audience-based approach to targeting across all online advertising channels and devices.“As display and social advertising evolve, performance marketers are looking for ways to achieve the same financial return with these channels that they’re accustomed to with search,” said David A. Yovanno, chief executive officer at Marin Software. “Search brings a wealth of real-time intent data and is a perfect match for retargeting. We believe by building-out our capabilities in display and social, our customers will be able to combine their search, display and social data to build and target audience segments across channels to drive better performance and scale. ““We’re thrilled to have Perfect Audience join the Marin Software team,” said Chris Lien, Marin’s founder and executive chairman. “In just a few short years, Brad, Jordan, and the Perfect Audience team have built a tremendous product that builds on Marin’s core value of enabling advertisers to buy online media to drive revenue. Marketers spend significant sums to drive prospects to their websites, but generally less than five percent of this traffic becomes customers. Adding Perfect Audience’s retargeting capabilities enables Marin’s advertisers to target the 95% of their traffic that doesn’t convert, generating more revenue from their online advertising programs.”Perfect Audience was founded in 2012 and offers businesses a simple but powerful online application to retarget consumers across the web through Facebook Exchange (FBX), Google’s Doubleclick Ad Exchange, Twitter, and other ad exchanges. Customers of Perfect Audience include American Apparel, bebe, Eventbrite, New Relic, 99 designs, and Rackspace. “Much like Marin Software, we started Perfect Audience to bring clarity and better results to a complex advertising channel,” said Brad Flora, co-founder and chief executive officer at Perfect Audience. “Combining the cross channel visibility and control of the Marin platform with our unique approach to retargeting allows marketers to reach their highest value audiences across the web, Facebook, and Twitter.” Marin Software expects the transaction to have no material impact on revenue and non-GAAP operating loss for the remainder of the second quarter. For full year 2014, the company expects the transaction will have no material impact on non-GAAP operating loss and will be slightly accretive to 2014 non-GAAP net loss per share. The company will provide updated financial guidance for 2014, including Perfect Audience’s expected contribution, during the regularly scheduled Q2 2014 earnings conference call.Additional details on the acquisition can be read here: http://www.marinsoftware.com/resources/news/marin-software-acquisition-of-perfect-audience-faq.