• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 10, 2010

Webtrends plans to announce Tuesday that it acquired privately held Transpond and integrated the platform into Webtrends Apps for Facebook. The platform will allow marketers who don't code to create, publish, manage and track digital marketing campaigns across the Web, social, and mobile sites.

Transpond will integrate into Webtrends tools for social media measurement, management, analytics and optimization. It supports consumer engagement around polls, quizzes, games, interactive commerce and content syndication that marketers can distribute across any digital medium to gain the same look and feel. The new capability will allow brands to measure success and optimize the transactions.

It took more than two months to integrate Transpond's platform and company into Webtrends, according to Webtrends CEO Alex Yoder. With the acquisition, Webtrends also gains new customers in media. Yoder points to Fox TV, Lifetime networks and a variety of others like AOL.

"The majority of solutions in this space come from creative agencies providing a service," Yoder says. "We found in Transpond a fully developed technology platform that will allow our customers to be self-directed."

Yoder admits that Webtrends' engineers would not have been successful in developing something similar to the Transpond platform in a reasonable time frame while the market is hot. He estimates the infant app market at about $3 billion when it comes to creative development and distribution.

Webtrends wants to help close the gap between the social areas where customers spend their time online and where brands spend their marketing efforts. Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs -- up from 15.8% last year, according to The Nielsen Company. The research finds that Americans spend 36% of their online time communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.

Along with Optimize's targeting features, Webtrends Apps moves the company firmly into marketing's create-and-deliver space. A reporting dashboard comes standard, but has an option to integrate Webtrends Analytics.

Webtrends also plans to expand into bit management. Today, the company offers it in traditional channels like Google and Bing, but will move to integrate with Facebook, display and email. Additional "action" systems will augment core platform options like acquisition, conversion and retention across social media, Web analytics and customer analytics, and advanced segmentation. Partnerships today support these services.

UPDATE: The headline on this story has been modified. The original was unintentionally misleading.