News

New user acquisition tool Acquired.io launches with $2 million in funding

Aims to streamline UA management

Date Type Companies involved Size
June 27th, 2017 investment Acquired.io $2m
New user acquisition tool Acquired.io launches with $2 million in funding

The founders of mobile marketing company AppScotch have launched a new company aimed at user acquisition.

Called Acquired.io, the team behind it has already raised $2 million in funding from investors including AdColony founder Jonathan Zweig and the former CFO of Second Life developer Linden Lab John Zdanowski.

Acquired.io has a similar layout to Google Analytics, and much like that widely-used tool, it’s designed to streamline user acquisition by providing a clean dashboard to manage channels, budgets and more.

UA simplified

The centralised platform lets users manage UA across a plethora of key channels like Snapchat, AdColony, Chartboost, Google, Facebook and more. Right now it supports 20 channels in total, but this will increase to 50 by the end of the year.

The idea is to simplify the process, for which Acquired.io found that the average UA team spends 80% of their time doing manual work managing various different channels. A difficult and time-consuming task, with the total number of potential channels rising to 1,500 this year.

“The sheer number of apps out there today makes it difficult for companies to get noticed,” said Andrey Kazakov, co-founder and CEO of Acquired.io.

“To be able to compete, advertisers need to maintain a wide and diverse portfolio of channels to acquire users, which puts enormous pressure on UA teams.

“Most advertisers have a portfolio of channels they deal with which spans from 10 to 50 channels depending on the company. Constantly discovering ways to acquire users is a part of the day to day job for UA teams, adding even more manual operations to their daily work. Our goal is to minimise the unnecessary manual work they face every day.”

One-stop shop

Acquired.io brings everything into one place. This means that as well as tracking which channels they are using, teams can track spending against their total budget, as well as look at key metrics such as CPIs and CPMs. Budgets also be paused, altered and reallocated on the fly.

Assets can also be added across various advertising channels, such as Google AdWords and Unity Ads, for example, and these will automatically fill in the compatible slots across the channels. In case there’s any doubt, image and video requirements are listed within the tool.

On top of this, teams can also discover and test new channels without having to go through a new set up process, should they be on the hunt for useful channels outside of the most well-known like Google and Facebook.

One interesting feature of Acquired.io is that users can set up their own rules to automate decisions. For example, this means that LTVs can be used as a way to govern buying through rules set up in the tool, so if current spend is more than that value or a channel isn’t meeting certain thresholds, those campaigns could be stopped automatically.

Further automation features to simplify management, as well an expansion into new markets, are also in the pipeline.

"First of its kind"

Customers that have used Acquired.io already include Lords Mobile developer IGG and TextNow.

“Mobile user acquisition, as the market grows, has become some sort of a ‘jungle’ for most publishers, with hundreds of networks or channels to deal with,” said Acquired.io SVP of Global Operations Mark Zhang.

“Configuring, monitoring and optimising thousands of online campaigns is a labour intensive, manual process for most.

“While the largest mobile gaming companies have the financial, technical and/or human resources to tackle this problem, most small to medium size publishers end up running mobile campaigns very inefficiently. I'm very excited to see Acquired.io coming up with a first of its kind, one-stop, DIY platform to solve this problem at scale.”

TextNow GM Mark Braatz added: “Acquired.io centralises our UA data and gives us the tools we need to increase our marketing efficiency. We’re able to leverage rules based optimisations across channels to maximise ROI – managing these capital allocations within a single dashboard is a huge win.”

For more details about Acquired.io and to book a demo, visit the official website.

If you’re at Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco 2017, taking place now (June 27th to 28th), the Acquired.io team will be at the event and will be happy to take your questions.

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