Twitter Acquires Ad Platform AdGrok

Rumors surfaced over the holiday weekend that Twitter was in talks to acquire AdGrok, and the startup has just confirmed the news on its blog.


A Y Combinator alum, AdGrok offers a platform to help businesses manage their Google Adwords. The company built a number of tools to make the process easier for businesses to be able to gauge the performance of the keywords they're buying, with a breakdown of the impressions, clicks, and conversion rates.


AdGrok says it will be joining Twitter's "revenue engineering team," and it's pretty apparent that the tools that the startup built could be adapted to help Twitter monetize its Promoted Tweets, as well as other campaigns.


"When Twitter approached us and asked if we'd be interested in working on their monetization platform, we realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we just couldn't pass up," says AdGrok co-founder Matthew McEachen. "The fact that the Twitter team is both smart and user-focused only made our decision easier."


For its part, AdGrok will no longer accept new companies, will stop charging its existing customers and will shut down its services at the end of the month. It also says it will make sure to unlink all customers' accounts from the AdGrok Google account and "securely delete our databases." No data from AdGrok's customers will be shared with Twitter.


According to Techcrunch's Alexis Tsotsis, who broke the news of the impending acquisition over the weekend, the deal was for "less than $10 million." She also noted that it was "complicated," surmising that this was due in part to co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez who recently changed his Facebook profile status to reflect that he's a product manager at Facebook.


Indeed, today's blog post by AdGrok is signed by McEachen and his fellow co-founder Argyris Zymnis, with no mention of Garcia-Martinez. We've reached out to the team for comment, but haven't heard back at the time of publishing.