April 20, 2007 | Friday

Experian buys Hitwise in deal worth £120m

By Jon Myers, Director Of Search in Search Research

It’s been a week for interesting acquisitions in the market. Yesterday it was announced that Hitwise has been taken over by credit report company Experian for $240m (£120m).

Hitwise for years has provided statistics on to over to over 1,200 direct clients across the world including Google Inc., eBay, Quantas and MTV. Hitwise collects data on keyword searches, page views and other information on about 25 million consumers.

So now that we have got the numbers out the way you have to ask yourself as always, ‘why the acquisition?’

Experian said “that the acquisition was in response to consumers increasingly moving online. It believes that as companies increasingly invest in online advertising, measuring the effectiveness of such advertising will become more important.”

Hitwise said “We will now be able to accelerate Hitwise’s growth and profitability through access to Experian’s wider pool of data, tools and clients, while more quickly expanding our global footprint,”

For me in makes for an interesting combination of companies and it will be interesting to see how this develops in the marketplace. Experian will integrate the company into its Experian Marketing Solutions unit. But let’s hope they will choose to sell direct to agencies going forward.