Martech and adtech continue their inexorable Big Smush™

Adtech and martech have been getting closer and closer. Now a new integration between retargeting leader AdRoll and marketing cloud vendor Marketo is showing why.

Thirty percent incremental lift, that’s why.

According to mobile intelligence provider App Annie, AdRoll’s new integration with Marketo resulted in a major uptick in conversions in its advertising. The company has “closed deals” and seen the 30 percent lift “at every stage of the customer journey,” according to App Annie user acquisition manager Kirk Jorgensen.

Here’s how it works:

You have first-party data on customers or prospects in your marketing cloud or marketing automation system — in this case, of course, Marketo. To drive prospects deeper into the funnel, and perhaps increase your share of wallet with existing customers, you add them to “AdRoll segments” that can be used target those users on any web property. Now you’re able to set up rules and classifications to deliver certain kinds of ads and content to those users wherever they go.

AdRoll said 65 customers have already used the integration, which Marketo said is bridging “the worlds of marketing and paid media.” Marketo released the core integration layer, Marketo Ad Bridge, earlier this year.

“Marrying ad tech and martech will make life more fruitful for marketers,” the company’s VP of product marketing, Chandar Pattabhiram, told me at that time. “Now, they’re no longer in separate swim lanes.”

We’ve been studying marketing clouds, marketing automation systems, mobile ads, and adtech in general at VB. The inexorable push is towards increased integration, mostly because the better data you inject into advertising campaigns, the better your results. That would seem to be self-evidently true — better targeting means you only show your ads to people who actually might care about them — but is also borne out by data. We’ve seen conversion rates bump 3X to 10X when using good, recent data for targeting … and, of course, first-party data is the best data to use.

This is not a secret. Facebook knows this, of course, which is why the world’s largest social network partnered with Marketo, Salesforce, Eloqua, Sailthru, and other marketing clouds and CRM systems with its “lead ads” product yesterday.

Smart application of technology and integration of data is closing the gap not just between marketing and advertising, but almost all the gaps, including sales tech and even customer support.