Conductor, an enterprise organic marketing company, announced
Tuesday the acquisition of European-based competitor Searchmetrics to accelerate its expansion in Europe.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Seth Besmertnik, Conductor CEO and
co-founder, called Searchmetrics a company with “a lot of soul, a lot of fight, and thought leadership,” which cares about its users and community. “The focus of the acquisition is
their customer base and being able to expand services globally,” Besmertnik said. “They support more than 500 global companies.”
The majority are enterprises -- companies
with more than 1,000 employees. Only about 10% of Searchmetrics customers overlap with Conductor's, but Besmertnik said he has not done that analysis yet.
Besmertnik also spoke about how
Conductor will integrate some of Searchmetrics’ technology into its own. Assets include data and content analysis assets.
“It’s unfortunate that they were wrapped in a really
bad patent lawsuit for many years with BrightEdge,” he said, adding that it created challenges for Searchmetrics. “It lasted about five years and resulted in tens of millions of dollars in
legal fees. Very distracting for a young company.”
Conductor had about 10% of its business in Europe, prior to the acquisition, and saw it as an opportunity to expand its presence. The
acquisition enables Conductor to conduct marketing in more than 10 languages, increase local support in all the major time zones, and brings on high-level engineering talent.
“We spoke
with them many times over the years to combine with Conductor,” Besmertnik said. “Now they realize the company would be better off joining us than going it alone.”
Searchmetrics’ product will integrate into Conductor’s, and its brand name will sunset in time.
Matt Colebourne, CEO of Searchmetrics, will join Conductor in the interim to
carry out the transition, and is likely to stay on in another capacity, Besmertnik said. About 75 Searchmetrics employees will join Conductor.
Searchmetrics also has a data-services business
where it processes and analyzes data, which will become part of Conductor’s data-services business.
This acquisition cements Conductor’s leadership position during continued
consolidation in the SEO space.
Following Conductor’s acquisition of ContentKing -- a real-time site auditing tool -- in 2022, this marks Conductor’s second acquisition in just the
last year, an indicator of the company’s accelerated growth since its $150
million round of funding from Bregal Sagemount in 2021.