• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 16, 2013

Marin Software will begin to offer a targeting option that integrates first- and third-party data through a partnership with BlueKai. The agreement, announced Monday, allows marketers to customize ads and optimize bidding by specific audience segments in search campaigns, as well as display, video, analytics, native advertising and site optimization through a platform the company calls Audience Connect. 

The platform breaks down the silos to combine audience data from Web site, offline, social, mobile, and analytics data with third-party data. It supports more than 40,000 attributes of audience data across 400 million profiles of purchase intent, demographic and behavioral data, and search data like keywords, cost, conversion and revenue.  

Marin Audience Connect allows marketers to create custom segments based on intent. It incorporates the ability to bid on search-based audience segments. "Imagine you're bidding on a brand term, and you have both consumer and enterprise customers," said Matt Ackley, CMO at Marin. "The audience data will allow you to distinguish between the two and you can adjust the creatives."

The platform works to target any consumer who lands on a brand's Web site and then leaves to conduct a search on an engine. BlueKai and the brand can drop a cookie in the consumer's browser. It integrates CRM and behavioral data after the consumer lands on the brand's Web site. The combination allows advertisers to more closely target income range, geography and other data points from both online and offline behaviors.

Ackley declined to provide the names of brands testing the system or the results from the tests. He did explain that one client saved between 12% and 15% of their search budget.

For B2B marketers, Marin Audience Connect integrates audience data from Bizo to give marketers access to 120 million business professionals. Ackerly said it allows B2B advertisers to optimize digital marketing campaigns by industry, company size, geography and job function.

"Bulls Eye" photo from Shutterstock.