Competitive advantage in the mobile games and app business is increasingly coalescing around hard analytics.
Eventually, this will result in the commoditisation of market intelligence and actionable data, but while that's occurring, plenty of companies are keen to highlight the extra percentage of performance they can bring to the table.
One such is Bay Area start-up Grow Mobile.
Set up by executives who during their time at Zynga and Storm8 were in charge of tens of millions of dollars of user acquisition budget, they've switched roles.
Now they're looking to help big advertising clients optimise their spending.
One screen to rule them
Raising a seed round of $1 million from Bessemer and Signia Venture Partners in October 2012, the company has been working on its mobile app marketing platform ever since.
Beta clients include the likes of GREE and Zynga but now the doors have been opened to any companies willing to meet the $20,000 monthly minimum spend.
Grow Mobile's founders: from left, AJ Yeakel COO, Brendan Lyall CEO, and Minglei Xu, CA
As for what the platform offers, CEO Brendan Lyall says it's integrated over 75 advertising, promotional and user acquisition networks (and counting) within one dashboard.
Supporting iOS and Android, publishers can access it either via the provided API or SDK.
"It's currently a very fragmented ecosystem but we're providing an all-in-one solution so you can buy, track, optimise and scale your campaigns," Lyall explains.
"And best of all for your CFO, at the end of the month, you get a single income invoice."
Pieces of the puzzle
In terms of functionality, Grow Mobile offers the usual mix of analytics so you can: break down users by geographic location, device and operating system; make comparisons by cohort and install channels; and compare App Store and Google Play rankings.
In terms of digging deeper into monetisation, there's a proprietary algorithm to calculate expected lifetime value, and user retention and revenue attribution broken down by traffic source.
But the key features are its media planner, campaign wizard and traffic intelligence directory.
The latter provides information such as pricing information and volume estimates so you can see which are the best traffic source available.
The campaign wizard, which can be automated, makes it easy to change and syndicate live campaigns, while the media planner is the starting point to set up your campaigns.
Big plans
In terms of the company itself, Lyall says that despite being a lean 11-strong outfit (obviously now hiring), he's confident Grow Mobile will scale well with success.
It's already moving into a new office.
"Gaming is the most sophisticated section of the app ecosystem so we're keen to provide the platform works for games and then expand into other verticals, " he says.
Similarly, the platform itself is designed to perform best at scale; hence that $20,000 minimum spend.
"It can accommodate as much traffic as we can throw at it," Lyall argues, adding that transparency at high volumes of activity is exactly what the company was set up to demonstrate.
"This is a power tool, and it's the right tool for the market now," he concludes.
You can find out more at Grow Mobile's website.
Interview
Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
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