In a time when data has never been more important to corporate marketing efforts, Demandbase Inc.’s latest acquisition shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise. The business-to-business targeting powerhouse is paying an undisclosed amount to pick up a startup called WhoToo Inc. that aggregates metrics about online audiences for its customers to consume centrally.

The information comes from public sources and commercial data exchanges that enterprises can theoretically tap without paying for a middleman, but in practice don’t lend themselves to well to consolidated analytics. Each feed has its own delivery format that needs to be painstakingly reconciled and harmonized with all the others, which is how WhoToo makes its living.

That puts the startup one tier lower on the analytics supply chain than Datalogix Holdings Inc. and BlueKai Inc., two direct user information aggregators for which Oracle paid a combined $1.6 billion last year in an effort to bolster its own marketing platform. But the purchase shares the same motive: Helping organizations target their customers more effectively.

Demandbase plans to achieve that by combining data from WhoToo’s service with its patented company identification technology, which promises to identify what organization a website visitor works for with much greater accuracy than conventional reverse IP lookups. That aims to help the business-to-business marketers that the vendor targets map out behavioral metrics to their most important accounts.

That way, a company selling, say, storage systems could detect when a purchasing manager at a given organization starts researching new arrays online and reach out to them via the appropriate channels. Such tailored targeting efforts can potentially be much more successful than broader audience-level tactics, which Demandbase is banking on to help set its platform apart from the competition.

The purchase of WhoToo is merely the latest milestone towards that goal. The funds for the deal came from a $30 million investment round led by Sageview Capital that was announced a couple months ago, a sizable portion of which is likely still in the bank, leaving open the possibility of more strategic acquisitions further down the road.

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