In the first major deal of the Felicia Bochicchio era at Unbounce, the conversion intelligence startup announced that it has acquired Portland-based LeadsRx, a marketing analytics company that helps customers understand their marketing spend attribution. The deal price was not disclosed.

The purchase helps Unbounce fill a key gap in its services, explained Tamara Grominsky, the company’s chief strategy officer. She said Unbounce has traditionally focused on the middle of the marketing funnel, the point where conversions are captured. “But we don't know a lot about what happens before that conversion, or before the visitor comes to the landing page,” Grominsky shared in an interview with Vancouver Tech Journal earlier this week. Unbounce hasn’t fully focused on what happens after that point of conversion either, so the opportunity to stitch the entire marketing journey together led the company to LeadsRx. “What we hope is that we're going to be able to provide much more data and actionable insights for our customers, so that they understand which marketing channels are performing, which marketing channels aren't performing, and really help them get more conversions and more of their best conversions as well,” Grominsky outlined.

Today, LeadsRx works with brands and agencies ranging from iHeartMedia and Casper to Cumulus Media and Rakuten Advertising. But like many successful startups, the company was started by a founder who was trying to solve his own problems. In 2015, AJ Brown, a long-time West Coast tech industry executive, was consulting with multiple firms’ marketing departments. His primary job was to generate leads. He was frustrated though. “I'd go to these Monday meetings with the CEO, and they would say, ‘AJ, how many? How many sales did we get last week? How are those ads working on Google?’” he said in an interview. “My only answer was, ‘Well, we got another 500 clicks on the Google ads. But I couldn't associate those clicks with revenue or demo requests, or any kind of inbound conversion, if you will. So I was really, really frustrated and frankly, embarrassed.”

These humbling experiences are what led AJ to “sit down and start writing the code” that would become LeadsRx in 2015. By the end of that year, he and co-founder Jeff Keenan, LeadsRx’s current SVP international, who he hired through Angel List, were beta testing the product. Fast-forward to 2022, and the business serves more than 5,000 global and local clients.

As to why Brown sold his bootstrapped business to Unbounce, he says he believes the companies are perfect for each other. They also have some history. LeadsRx launched an integration with Unbounce in 2017. “We knew at the time that these things belong together—attribution and landing pages,” he recalled, and from then on, the two firms stayed in touch over the years.

Then in 2020, Brown hired investment bankers to help find potential partners or buyers. They looked at hundreds of potential strategic partners. “Really, the objective was to think of how what we do with attribution could be part of something bigger so that we could get a bigger footprint and more expansive use of the product,” Brown explained. “Unbounce popped up because they remembered us and when we started talking, it was just a match made in heaven.”

While two firms are technically now one, Brown will remain CEO of LeadsRx while reporting to Unbounce CEO Bochicchio. For now, the 21-person LeadsRx team will continue to operate independently.

Unbounce’s last acquisition was of Snazzy AI, an AI copywriting tool, in May of 2021. It became a key piece of the firm’s conversion intelligence platform announced last September. Counting the LeadsRx team, Unbounce is now approximately 265 employees.