London-based AD-X Tracking is seeking to shed light on mobile ad campaign expenditures and has revved up its global presence with new offices in San Francisco and Berlin. Founded in 2012, AD-X helps clients such as eBay and Expedia.com track in-app clicks and downloads, along with mobile campaign performance spanning search, SMS, social, email and banner ads.
In a chat with AdExchanger, AD-X Chief Technology Officer Phil Jones notes the company has strong interest from retail, hospitality and gaming companies to decipher consumer mobile intent.
AdExchanger: Where does Ad-X play in the ad ecosystem?
PHIL JONES: Our clients are mainly the mobile-app owners and their agencies, quite often. So we work on their behalf as a third-party tracker. That’s the key thing and we’re moving toward being the data parent and setting mobile strategies.
How do you work with commerce giants like eBay and Expedia.com?
Customers like eBay have pushed us more and more into actually analyzing their usership and analyzing the true lifetime value of the users they pick up with their advertising. eBay, in particular, got us more into doing in-app analysis, which is all tied back to the money they spend on advertising. They want us to analyze how many people opened the app on a particular day, how are bids placed and the value of the user (categories) they’ve selected.
We developed an incredibly complex sort of analytics approach to the specification of eBay to give them whatever sort of visibility they want. Say you spend $1 million on advertising in one particular place. Does that mean that users who spend more time in the app spend more money in the app than if you spent the same $1 million on another asset? Those are the questions we’re looking to answer.
Are advertisers privy to the breakdown between tablet and smartphone attribution and associated user behaviors?
Very much so. As we look into the future, they’re very much trying to understand a given user and, “Do they have a phone or a tablet?” or a few of each and how do they use each differently?
Are marketers “there yet” with mobile retargeting?
We’re not there yet with mobile, but that’s going to really start happening in the next six months. The demand is really there and companies are beginning to come up with retargeting strategies to target adverts to categorized users or “user types.” Let’s say we know that somebody is already using Expedia.com’s hotel app and has been searching for hotels recently in London. Tracking technology is the basis of a company deciding how to serve an advert to an individual next time so it’s not irrelevant [and so they can] feed that information back to London hotels, for instance, to create a special offer. Tracking technology is really only starting to mature in mobile. That sets it back a little bit compared to online advertising, but it’s there, it’s stable and strong enough to build that retargeting stuff on top of it.
