Adobe will extend its digital marketing activities with the agreement to buy Efficient Frontier, a privately-owned specialist in multichannel advertising buying and optimisation.

The Postscript and desktop publishing pioneer now captures about five trillion digital transactions a year for more than 5000 customers, including many of the world’s largest advertisers, publishers and advertising agencies. The Efficient Frontier acquisition will enable it to add campaign forecasting, execution and optimisation capabilities to its Digital Marketing Suite.

The company says it will continue to build upon the foundation of its independent ad buying and optimisation platform for search, social and display, enabling it to offer a more complete suite of capabilities. Senior vice president and general manager of digital marketing Brad Rencher says the addition will give DMS customers a platform for turning ad spend into business impact.

Adobe gains a social ad buying capability for Facebook, which leverages Efficient Frontier’s optimisation algorithms to predict results and drive greater returns. Additionally, a user will be able to upload creative elements for it to automatically generate ad combinations.

Adobe says these capabilities will be integrated with the Facebook ad buying functionality currently available with its SearchCenter+. The acquisition will also bring a social marketing engagement platform, offering customers tools and services to help them build, manage, monitor and measure their brand presence across the social web.

Adobe says it will combine this social engagement capability with Adobe SocialAnalytics, an analytics solution that moves beyond social monitoring to tie social media to business results.

Efficient Frontier’s search optimisation experience will be applied to display advertising with a real-time bidding system using its algorithms, which would learn from site traffic and conversion data from the Digital Marketing Suite.

Efficient Frontier also takes the guesswork out of the auction-based buying process for search, display and social media by using an algorithmic approach to generate bids and allocate budget across digital channels. Customisable algorithms are built on historical performance data.

Adobe says completion of the transaction – which is subject to customary government approvals and conditions – is expected in the first quarter 2012.