Thanks to its free-to-play browser game business, there are lots of strong German online marketing companies.

And they're all now quickly moving to embrace mobile gaming.

One such as Crobo, which is part of the 100-strong Covus specialist marketing group.

According to CEO Matthias Lesch, the sector already accounts for 20 percent of its business, and with clients ranging from Supercell to EA, Mail.ru, Ubisoft and Gameforge, it's continuing to grow fast.

We spoke to Lesch about how Crobo can help content creators and advertisers, and how he expects the mobile user acquisition market to develop.

Pocket Gamer: Can you explain what services Crobo offers?

Matthias Lesch: Crobo provides intelligent user acquisition, both for online and mobile marketing campaigns, bringing high quality monetizing to game companies.

Crobo's analytics tools provide games publishers with real-time-monitoring of traffic quality and kick out under-performing traffic sources, while they promote best performing media partners to increase their traffic volumes.

As a result we deliver a great combination of price and quality for the advertising games publishers and very efficient monetization opportunities for our media partners.

How has the shift from online/browser games to mobile games affected the services you offer?

Crobo keeps up with the times. We understand the needs of games publishers and provide full range of games marketing campaigns both for online and mobile.

Mobile currently makes up over 20 percent of our monthly revenues and is definitely a key driver for our growth. We increased the amount of mobile specialists within our staff in order to deepen our understanding of the requests mobile games publishers have.

Do you think online gaming portals can be good for mobile distribution, or do you have to move in-app?

Gaming portals can be good as they have mobile traffic. With a proper approach it can bring online gamers onto mobile games.

Nevertheless, portals should consider in-app approach as this is the best option to create single user environment for an online version of a game together with a mobile one. In this way, one user can play the same game on multiple devices.

Would you release a mobile games recommendation app as some companies have done?

We are considering such an option. Game recommendation apps are a very competitive sector at the moment.

This is why we are working on a fresh and entertaining approach for games discovery.

There are a lot of companies offering similar services so what do you think gives Crobo a competitive advantage?

We are focused on games and quality installs or leads - and we deliver it. But our biggest advantage is that we are very transparent.

Our technology Crobo Intelligence enables us to provide advertisers and publishers with the right metrics to optimize campaigns and to analyse user engagement. Crobo Technology detects and reports frauds in the bargain - that saves the customer money.

This gives us a huge advantage and secures us long term campaigns with advertisers.

And there's more. Since we have many people who used to work on the game development-side we know the needs and requests for game marketing campaigns.

Furthermore, we're working with direct in-house traffic sources such as browsergames.de, sat1spiele.de and other gaming websites. We have long term trustful marketing relationships with our media partners, so we are a predictive and reliable partner for games marketing.

As a German company, are you strongest in Europe, or can you offer global campaigns?

We are offering global campaigns. Thanks to our base of traffic partners we are able to deliver traffic in currently over 167 countries.

Besides Europe, the US, South America and Asia are emerging markets for us. To assist our growth we will open up subsidiaries in US in Q4 2013 and Asia in Q2 2014.

What do you think is the future of performance marketing for mobile games?

Classical user acquisition campaigns will probably be replaced with paying user acquisition, which is a next step after Cost-per-Install pricing model. This is where intelligent performance analysis becomes crucial.

In addition, we see that number of tablets is growing faster than the amount of smartphones, so this is where the demand for the inventory will increase even further.

From geographical perspective, Asian markets are trending particularly with rapidly growing number of Android devices. We are working on covering all the opportunities which will arise from these trends.

You can check out Crobo's services via its website.