Why Could Alphabet (Google) Want To Buy HubSpot?

When I first heard the news that Alphabet, the parent company behind Google, is considering acquiring HubSpot I immediately thought it sounded odd and made for strange bedfellows! It was baffling, to be honest. However, if you dig deeper for a rationale, and also happen to regularly run digital marketing campaigns, you can see why it may make sense. Let me explain.

We have used HubSpot for many years at my digital marketing agency (Dotsavvy) when running campaigns for marketing automation and also as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. One thing that HubSpot does exceedingly well is being able to give you a complete picture of how your campaigns are performing when you need to understand where conversions are coming across a myriad of digital marketing activities. This is especially important to understand the return on marketing investment and also the best-performing digital marketing channels. Data-driven insights are everything in digital marketing!

However, these insights ‘live’ within HubSpot as you use digital advertising platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads to run the actual campaigns that generate traffic and conversions like sales leads or products sold via e-commerce transactions. So, why could Alphabet (Google) be considering a play for HubSpot at a premium north of US$ 36B? Imagine a way of running digital marketing campaigns that all run on one integrated platform that would live within Google’s extensive digital marketing ecosystem.

This would mean being able to do everything in one place which translates into having an incredibly effective digital advertising platform in Google Ads. It also means being able to ‘see’ the whole digital customer journey from start to finish ending up in the CRM and beyond. This ‘complete’ or ‘full-funnel’ view of the customer journey would be incredibly valuable to Google from a data insights perspective but also to Google’s advertising customers. Therefore, if Google could fully merge HubSpot’s marketing technology or ‘martech’ with it’s market-leading advertising technology or ‘adtech’ it could be truly disruptive in my opinion.

The potent combination of what makes both HubSpot and Google highly successful as businesses would be unique in the global digital marketing ecosystem. One thing Google has always excelled at is using data as the foundation of its business across every offering it has so far brought to the market with great success. HubSpot could effectively become another arrow in its quiver to not only create a compelling digital marketing proposition but also further enhance Google’s dominance in the global digital marketing landscape.