• by Jess Nelson , April 19, 2017

Oracle has made another acquisition in the digital marketing space to boost its cloud services, this time announcing an agreement to buy ad measurement firm Moat.  

Moat is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider that tracks how consumers are engaging with online advertising. The company’s analytics platform tracks browsing and viewing behavior across mobile, desktop and connected devices, including TVs. The company also measures attention analytics, providing insight into what specific types of content consumers are engaging with and which parts of the screen are most viewed. 

Moat provides its customers -- such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the New York Times -- with ad measurement analytics, and claims that it can separate real human engagement from bots, so that advertisers pay for actual engagement as opposed to fake clicks.

Moat will continue to operate independently under the Oracle Data Cloud division, so customers should expect no disruption of service. Moat’s advertising intelligence and data will be asset to the Oracle Data Cloud, an analytics and data science platform for marketers and publishers.

"With the Moat acquisition, Oracle Data Cloud now offers brands and publishers a full suite of targeting and measurement solutions to improve the outcome of virtually every type of digital advertising campaign," states Eric Roza, SVP and GM of Oracle Data Cloud.

Digital marketing services are in high demand, and the major marketing cloud vendors have been conducting a war of M&A attrition to develop the best, holistic, data-driven platform through acquisition.

Moat will join fellow acquired companies Datalogix, CrossWise, and AddThis under the Oracle Data Cloud umbrella.

Oracle did not disclose the price of acquisition, although Moat had previously raised $67.5 million in four funding rounds from investors.