Twitter announced that it has agreed to acquire marketing technology company TellApart and partnered with Google’s DoubleClick to strengthen its cross-device measurement capabilities.

TellApart provides retail and e-commerce advertisers with cross-device retargeting features for dynamic product ads, and Twitter sees the acquisition as a way to help advertisers reach its users wherever they are on desktop or mobile. Twitter says it will extend TellApart’s services internationally and to additional industries.

“We’re making strong investments in our direct response capabilities in order to enable advertisers to target the right users, drive action with creative ad units and simplify the measurement of conversion performance across devices,” said Kevin Weil, SVP of product at Twitter. “On the targeting side, recently we made it simpler for advertisers to target audiences on Twitter on both mobile and desktop, based on their own data or based on intent signals off of Twitter. As for creative tools, we’ve pioneered native ad units such as the Website Card, App Card and Lead Generation Card, all built specifically to drive action. For measurement, our introduction of enhanced conversion tracking has made it easier for advertisers to see their website purchases from Promoted Tweets across mobile and desktop.”

TellApart co-founder and CEO Josh McFarland discussed the acquisition further in a blog post, saying:

One of the biggest challenges facing marketers today is the fractured nature of the consumer experience – across devices, between the web and apps, and between the digital and the physical worlds. While there are no silver bullets to solve this problem for advertisers, we believe that by working together with Twitter we can considerably improve the experience. On desktop, advertisers on our platform reach the right consumers at the right moments, and working with Twitter, we’ll be able to do more for our advertisers to find the right consumers on either mobile, desktop or both.

A big part of what drives us at TellApart is the idea that consumers can find value in ads if they’re relevant, compelling and timely. Indeed, we’ve based our business on getting paid only when users click on an ad they find interesting and then make a purchase from the advertiser. This is a part of Twitter’s core too, with their innovative native ad units that target the right user to drive the right engagement and action across devices.

Turning to the DoubleClick partnership, the two have announced two new initiatives aimed at better serving clients of both.

“The first relates to our mutual desire to offer more complete campaign performance measurement and attribution, especially for direct response marketers,” explained Ameet Ranadive, Sr. Director of Product Management at Twitter. “Consumers now move fluidly between apps, devices and platforms, and we need measurement models that take this behavior into account. For marketers to truly understand the consumer path to conversion across multiple devices and platforms, measurement systems have to move beyond traditional attribution models. And we want advertisers to have insights into the rich canvas of actions beyond website clicks on platforms like ours (e.g., Retweets) and the role they play in determining a campaign’s ROI.”

Twitter advertisers will be able to use DoubleClick to measure when conversions result from views and other Twitter actions. A new attribution model will be introduced in DoubleClick later this year.

The second initiative will see Twitter inventory becoming available through DoubleClick Bid Manager, so clients can create and manage campaigns on Twitter from there.

“This deal complements our ongoing push to bring new formats and inventory to DoubleClick, like our recent announcement about YouTube’s TrueView format,” noted Payam Shodjai, Group Product Manager at DoubleClick.

As reported earlier this year, Google and Twitter are also partnering on search, though we’ve still yet to see or hear exactly how this will be implemented.

Twitter just released its disappointing earnings report.

Image via Twitter