Singular and Apsalar are consolidating, and they’ve got their collective head in the marketing cloud.
On Tuesday, the duo announced that they will become one and marry their respective technologies – Singular’s mobile marketing analytics tech and Apsalar’s mobile attribution and DMP offering – to take on the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce on the mobile front.
“The marketing clouds established themselves on the web, and now they’re adding mobile capabilities – they’re doing it in reverse,” said Apsalar founder Michael Oiknine, who’s joining Singular as CRO and chief strategy officer. “But mobile is the center of gravity for intelligence gathering.”
The Singular and Apsalar stacks have been integrated, and several customers, including Lyft, are already live on the blended platform. Together, the companies have a combined headcount of 110 and a global footprint spanning San Francisco, Israel, India, Japan and Germany. Everyone is staying on board.
Although the Apsalar name is being retired, the unified entity under the Singular brand will retain Apsalar’s status as an official measurement and attribution partner of Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Twitter and Snap.
The two companies decided to join forces because they each had blind spots. Singular’s system helps marketers track spend and ROI across channels. Apsalar’s platform was set up to attribute app installs and monitor post-install in-app behavioral data.
Marketing spend and behavioral data historically dwell in separate silos, which makes it difficult for marketers to measure whether the money they put into a campaign has resulted in the desired action.
“A driving force in the market right now is the aspiration to get more granular, to get to the user level,” Oiknine said. “But the bigger challenge for marketers is actually getting that data. It’s as simple as wanting to be able to connect the pieces and not being able to.”
The aim is to bring the disparate data sets together natively in the back end so that they can be matched at the user level to the revenue that’s generated, said Singular’s CEO and co-founder, Gadi Eliashiv.
Say a marketer wants to identify which specific image or video led to an install or caused a user to come back to an app and make a purchase. To understand that journey in its entirety, a marketer needs to connect behavior and marketing with revenue.
“Marketers need to get that granular with their analysis if they’re going to compete,” Eliashiv said.
The result is what Singular is calling “unified marketing analytics,” an analytics platform built off the back of marketing and behavior data.
Marketers can connect data across marketing sources, including retargeting, email and push, and analyze cross-channel performance by country, campaign, ad creative and publisher. The platform also enables marketers to create segments based on user behavior and attributes that can be distributed to third parties, such as ad networks, marketing clouds and BI systems.
For now, the plan is to focus on growth and hit larger revenue goals. But down the line, a marketing cloud looking for mobile chops could come knocking.
“Why did Adobe just go and buy a media company? It’s because they know that even though they have push and email, when money is spent outside of their cloud, they start having a hard time digesting it at a user level to give true marketing ROI analysis,” Oiknine said. “I strongly believe we can disrupt the marketing clouds and that we’ll meet with these guys one day.”
