The flurry of acquisitions in the digital marketing technology space continues. At RSG, we covered many of these acquisitions and their implications for technology customers - e.g. Adobe-Neolane. Salesforce – ExactTarget & EntropySoft. Oracle – Eloqua, Collective Intellect, Involver, Vitrue and many more.

To this M&A list we can now add Marketo, one of the vendors we evaluate in our Digital Marketing Technology research, who last week announced the acquisition of Insightera, an Israeli vendor of website personalization software tools.

Marketo sells B2B marketing automation software that mainly works alongside the Salesforce.com CRM for mid-sized businesses in North America. As a company that only went public fairly recently, Marketo will be hungry for growth. On top of it, Marketo has to compete with the much larger rivals (the Big 4 – Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce.com), who themselves are trying to fill gaps in their marketing technology offerings through numerous inorganic moves and are also aggressively targeting long-tail (i.e., smaller businesses) customers. So, Marketo’s move is a nod to this market reality.

Insightera itself sells tools that utilize web analytics, location info, and data your from CRM & marketing automation software to display more targeted content to website visitors. If you need a quick refresher of how digital marketing and web content & experience management work together, check out our recent advisory paper on core competencies in digital marketing.

Insightera is already a Marketo partner and their tools have been deployed together at a few customers. So, in the short term, more than technology integration focus, expect cross-sell pitches. Insightera also works with Eloqua and Hootsuite, and the announcement notes that they will continue to support these as well, at least for the time-being.

But, stepping back a bit, I also wonder if digital marketing technology companies are chasing the puck rather than positioning themselves to where the puck will be. Many of the acquired capabilities add technology services for the “traditional” web experience. But mobile is fundamentally altering this equation. An estimated 40% of Black Friday online shopping happened through mobile devices...

True cross-channel marketing and integrating mobile technology is a big puzzle that we will all still have to work hard to crack in 2014 and beyond.