Google announced a deal to buy business analytics software vendor Looker for $2.6 billion. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Google’s existing cloud database products by letting users create shared business metrics and develop applications. Looker will continue to run on all cloud database platforms.

Nothing is murkier than influencer marketing. Klear, an influencer marketing platform, says it can fix this with a newly-announced feature to estimate campaign ROI by calculating Earned Media Value – that is, the how much it would cost to buy the same amount of coverage in paid media (a.k.a. advertising). Not everyone agrees that EMV is a valid approach.

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)