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Experian, a global information solutions company has announced tha acquisition of HitWise, a major web statistics company for approximately $240 million.

Experian needed HitWise because most of their clients continued to allocate more money towards online advertisement, and hence were demanding some sort of marketing intelligence data from Experian for a while now. Prior to this Experian provided offline research services and email distribution to its clients. The acquisition will enable Experian clients to carry out more targeted online mass marketing campaigns.

With growing competition Market analysis and research is becoming ever more important. The increased spendings in online advertisements has also spur the need for better targeting tools, specially the ones that allow companies to track user attention and hence modify and re design their ad campaigns. This has resulted in increased activity in the web analytics market with Google buying Trendalyzer, Quantcast raising $5.7 million in first round of funding, comScore filing for an IPO, and Clicktale launching Heatmaps to provide content owners with an understanding of which portions of the site received most attention from users. With the increasing amount of time people are spending online, the advertisers drive to reach eyeballs is hitting Internet as well. All these activities are just symptoms of this change, and more is yet to come.

Update: Marshal Kirkpatrick has a really interesting post highlighting the role of blogosphere in this acquisition. They truly raised their profile by leveraging social media, specially by coming up with important statistics at key junctures, sometimes by telling us that Photobucket rules online photo storage space and others by informing us that Bebo is bigger than MySpace in UK.

In every story there are lessons to be learned, did you noted down yours from this one?

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