It’s acquisition season.
I think we’re going to see more SaaS acquisitions in the coming months as the markets start to show a significant slowdown (especially in private markets).
The acquisition of Oribi by LinkedIn is one of the most interesting SaaS acquisitions I’ve seen in a while. It’s interesting because Oribi doesn’t fall into the same category of some of the more high-profile acquisitions that have turned heads in the marketing world over the last couple years. The entire internet erupted when Hubspot bought The Hustle and SEMRush bought Backlinko.
These acquisitions were different because they were essentially an audience arbitrage play where the acquisition gave the acquirer more reach and a broader audience to connect with.
The Oribi marketing engine in comparison to The Hustle or Backlinko is small potatoes.
Here’s a few Oribi numbers (estimates):
- 53,800 visits a month
- 15-20k/mos organic visits
- 52k historic backlinks
- 62 employees (on LinkedIn)
But the product itself is where Oribi shines. TechCrunch suggests that it was acquired for $80-$90 million.
Oribi is a marketing analytics tool that will help you analyze and understand your marketing engine from top to bottom. It’s not a tool that I’m overly familiar with but the circles I run in have all praised their analytics capabilities and experience. Oribi has been positioned in the market as the tool that solves the problems that Google Analytics users struggle with every single day. It’s a no-code software that summarizes the data in a user-friendly dashboard and allows you to get data on clicks and on-site experiences. When Tomer Cohen, the Chief Product Officer at LinkedIn described the acquisition he said:
Our investment in Oribi builds on our focus to create solutions that connect organizations with their professional audiences. With more than 57 million global businesses building their brands on Pages and more than 24,000 virtual events being created each week, LinkedIn has never been more important in connecting organizations and professional communities while creating value for businesses.
Today, LinkedIn’s campaign manager is becoming more and more robust as they launch new features.
The acquisition of Oribi could potentially integrate directly into Campaign Manager and make the data even more high quality. The dashboard today already offers you the ability to gain insight surrounding the people who are visiting your website. You can see the company size, company, job seniority, job title, etc… All broken down by what pages on your website they visited:
Now imagine the power of this on the click level.
Oribi allows you to track a ton of different events on your website.
You can track:
- Demo Requests
- Product Page visits
- Webinar Registrations
- Asset Downloads
- Newsletter Subs
- Blog Visits
- Pricing Page Visits
- And more.
Someone clicks “Free Trial” and you immediately are able to capture LinkedIn data surrounding that interaction.
Now imagine this:
That’s a screenshot of Oribi.
You can also use Oribi to quickly see what sites are driving referral traffic…
Now imagine:
LinkedIn uses this data to optimize your advertising efforts so you can now run ads targeting anyone who is ‘following’ or ‘interested in’ the content from the site that is referring traffic your way. Imagine they did this using programmatic optimization and you didn’t have to touch a thing. It would be a thing of beauty… Similarly, it would be a thing of beauty if LinkedIn was able to combine data from other paid media campaigns like what’s happening on Google and Facebook with their own to create even more targeted ads.
I know. This is all a dream.
But it’s also very interesting.
Why?
Because Oribi wasn’t acquired by Looker, Pendo, Mixpanel or Heap…
It was acquired by LinkedIn.
You know:
The company that was acquired by Microsoft.
You know:
The company that acquired Activision Blizzard, Minecraft, Skype, Github, and so much more…
That means Oribi just got a nice increase in the amount of budget it could play with. It also means that Oribi just got access to one of the best B2B data sets in the world. This could very well be the chess move that allows LinkedIn to compete with some of the best digital analytics software solutions in the market. Maybe even Google…
If I ran an ABM software company… This would have my attention.
Because LinkedIn is definitely aware of the goldmine it’s sitting on in terms of data. And it’s also fully aware of the opportunity that comes from improving both the quality of the data and the user experience that comes with it.
PS: If you’re from Oribi and you’re reading this. Congrats.
