• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 27, 2014

L.A.-based The Search Agency on Friday will announce the acquisition of MoFuse. The technology will support mobile marketing campaigns for local businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Search Agency will integrate the MoFuse technology into its AdMax Local campaign platform, explains Ben Gibson, the company's global managing director. Automation helps to support small and mid-size local companies as a software as a service. "Mobile has become one of the most important pieces to get right, and without the correct technology it's not possible," he said.

Integration of the two platform should be complete by the end of the year. Annette Tonti, MoFuse founder and CEO, will join The Search Agency.

The acquisition follows the ad industry's mantra of mobile first. The MoFuse acquisition allows The Search Agency to manage the site creation and generation of traffic on mobile devices for local campaigns. Gibson believes the technology can drive more calls with greater leads.

When asked why the 30 engineers supporting The Search Agency's research and development team didn't build a similar mobile platform rather than acquire the five-person company, Gibson said, "when we don't find the technology in the market, we will build the technology ourselves."

MoFuse brings The Search Agency clients support for QR codes, coupons, and locator triggers that can find nearby stores. It also brings a range of functions like the capability to identify where phone calls originate and the keywords from a search that generate the action. The data provides feedback that's fed into the lead generation tool to target campaigns for better results.

Automation, for the most part, runs the AdMax platform. It only requires brands to answer three simple questions about the company: who, what and where. The system places campaign bids based on the answers and automates processes like account creation, keyword and ad copy, optimization, bid management and more.

Making the system efficient in local marketing, The Search Agency categorized thousands of product and services, as well as defined human actions based on that behavior. "We also broke down all geographies into small bits of data, which means tens of thousands of individual locations," Gibson said.