Optimove, which selects customer treatments based on movement between lifecycle stages, has expanded its scope to include acquisitions as well as existing customers. The new feature uses look-alike modeling to assign new Web site visitors to segments and then selects the most appropriate treatment for each segment. The company says that combining acquisition and retention marketing will yield an average 25% lift in conversion rates. If you’re keeping track: Optimove builds a unified, accessible, persistent customer database, making them a Customer Data Platform.

When it comes to picking ad buying systems, the software is less important than the data it can access. That’s the moral of this Digiday report that Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) is now tied with Google among ad buying agencies. Amazon’s software isn’t especially great but it has exclusive access to Amazon’s data on individual consumers’ shopping history. Low price and self-service options also weigh in Amazon’s favor.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.