ClickTracks Sells Out (No, Not Really!...Well, Yeah, Sort Of)

Had an email this morning from the ClickTracks team announcing that the firm has been acquired by J.L. Halsey, a publicly traded firm that also owns Lyris, EmailLabs and most recently Hot Banana. Basically, ClickTracks will become an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of J.L. Halsey. Now, normally I don't really blog about acquisitions and mergers, but since ClickTracks is one of my favorite companies in terms of what they offer small businesses, I find it interesting to speculate on what this might mean to the future of small business analytics.

J.L. Halsey's current companies Lyris Technologies and EmailLabs specialize in email marketing software solutions. Basically, they help small businesses build and manage opt-in email lists as well as providing the tools to create, send and track email marketing through those lists. Hot Banana, which was acquired at the same time as ClickTracks, is a search engine friendly web content management system that's used by small to mid-size businesses in the U.S. and Canada.

What makes this interesting is the potential for sharing data back and forth and for integration of some of the offerings. For example, ClickTracks has been continually working on building a really strong bid management tool into their analytics system. Integrated bid management means that small business owners can quickly see how a campaign is performing and then make whatever changes are necessary to bids or text in order to improve it. If ClickTracks could build in and add a similar tool for email marketing campaigns that offered the power of the Lyris and EmailLabs systems, you'd really have a nice new offering.

There's also no doubting what a great team can do with more resources, which is precisely what ClickTracks hopes will happen. "The arrangement provides investments and increased resources for acceleration of ClickTracks' product development, marketing, sales and support capabilities, and it gives us a much larger addressable market for ClickTracks products. This is particularly exciting because integration with these products fits in perfectly with our product roadmap" said John Marshall, CEO of ClickTracks.

I've been following ClickTracks for years now and have always been impressed with their dedication to the small business market. With many companies, I'd be concerned that an acquisition like this would lead to more focus on larger clients at larger bill rates, but I'm confident that the team John has put together will work to make sure both small and mid-sized businesses will benefit from these developments. In the meantime, it will be very interesting to see how things progress.