AppsFlyer announced its second-ever “real” acquisition on Wednesday (its first was an acqui-hire in 2018) with the purchase of devtodev, an analytics provider for app and game developers.
Advertisers love a captive audience, and there are few audiences more captive than mass-transit riders. So it was perhaps inevitable that Intel-owned urban mobility app Moovit would launch an ad platform. Moovit’s advertising service is live for advertisers in Latin America, Italy and Israel, and the company plans to roll it out everywhere its app is used.
Although Apple held off on dropping any ad tech industry-shaking privacy news at its Worldwide Developers Conference last week, it did publish documentation about the next version of SKAdNetwork – we’re up to 4.0 now – which includes a handful of new features that developers and mobile measurement providers have been asking for.
After a pandemic-induced lull in deal activity in 2020, last year was wall-to-wall consolidation across the media and marketing technology sectors. Total deal making activity in 2021 was up more than 82% year over year, according to LUMA’s 2021 market report, released last week.
Mobile advertising companies are being snapped up at eye-popping valuations. But wait … isn’t Apple torpedoing the ability to target and measure app advertising with its AppTrackingTransparency framework, SKAdNetwork and other privacy-focused policies? We untangle that contradiction on this week’s episode of The Big Story, where the editorial team is joined by special guest John […]
Twitter is integrating the CrossInstall mobile-only DSP it acquired last year with MoPub’s ad exchange platform in a push to woo more performance-based marketers. CrossInstall, which came along with its own bidder and proprietary creative ad formats, has been renamed MoPub Acquire and its team will now be part of MoPub, after having operated as […]
Roku said Tuesday it added six new ad tech companies to its Measurement Partner Program to help retail, CPG, pharma, auto and other advertisers better measure ad campaign performance — such as mobile app downloads — as marketers shift their spending to streaming. Adjust, Affinity Solutions, Branch, IRI, Kochava, and Veeva Crossix have joined Roku’s partner program — […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Mike Brooks, SVP of revenue at WeatherBug. In a few weeks, the first of several monolithic industry dominos is set to fall when Apple begins enforcing its AppTrackingTransparency framework on […]
INCRMNTAL, a startup focused on incrementality testing and measurement, launched on Monday with $1.4 million in pre-seed funding. The round includes participation from a handful of angels, early stage venture firm toDay Ventures and the Mobile Dev Memo Investment Syndicate, an initiative that vets seed and pre-seed opportunities in the mobile space. Interest in incrementality, […]
Eliminating arbitrage will become even more important after Apple implements its IDFA changes. Realistically, anywhere from 30% to 80% of a publisher’s traffic is being arbitraged, said Nathan Levin, CEO and founder of Mobile UA Ltd., a one-man consultancy he founded in 2018 to help developers navigate the mobile ecosystem’s complexities and tripwires. His clients […]
Affiliate marketers are largely overlooking what could be one of their best-performing channels: apps. Although most retail marketers say they generate hardly any app installs from their affiliate programs, the reality is quite different, said Mike Jaconi, CEO and co-founder of mobile commerce marketing company Button. App users are more loyal, more likely to make […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Mike Brooks, SVP of revenue at WeatherBug. WeatherBug has participated in dozens of closed-door partner and ecosystem meetings regarding Apple’s impending iOS 14 release, and one thing has become painfully clear: App publishers bear […]
With iOS set to get a lot less measurable, developers are considering putting more of their performance budgets into Android. The impetus is Apple’s move to start requiring an opt-in for its proprietary advertising ID, the IDFA, beginning with iOS 14 in September. Without ready access to the IDFA, apps are limited in their ability […]
Despite a healthy second quarter that shrugged off the economic downturn, Facebook CFO Dave Wehner warned investors on Thursday that Apple’s IDFA changes coming in iOS 14 could “prove to be a challenging headwind.” “We’re still trying to understand what these changes will look like and how they impact us and the rest of the […]
Users flocked to apps during the first few months of lockdown. Paid acquisition was a bargain thanks to lower ad demand, while entertainment apps, games, fitness apps and delivery apps saw massive upticks in organic usage. Global downloads for hypercasual games, for example, shot up 103% between December 2019 and March of this year, according […]
Google bolstered its deep linking offering on Wednesday by enabling from YouTube ads, Hotel ads, Gmail ads and ads in Discovery, which is the main section of the Google app. Previously, it had only been available in search, display and Shopping ads. The line between apps and the mobile web has been blurring for years, […]
Apple didn’t explicitly kill off its ad ID during its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday as some expected, but it sure looks like it’s laying the groundwork. Sandwiched between flashy announcements about the Apple Watch, macOS Big Sur and surround-sound AirPods, Apple dropped a bombshell for third-party mobile ad tech. Starting with iOS 14, which […]
Mosaic Group, IAC’s global app division, is probably one of the biggest mobile app developers you’ve never heard of. It owns 40 utility apps, including RoboKiller, the largest spam call blocker in the United States; iTranslate, the translation app with the greatest penetration after Google Translate; and the hugely popular Daily Burn fitness app. Mosaic […]
Creative optimization is one of the most effective tactics that mobile growth marketers can use to boost performance. But it’s also a pain in the butt. User acquisition managers must test an enormous amount of creative assets by size, color, copy and placement type before they find those that really work for specific pockets of […]
Media and Games Invest (MGI), the German holding company that acquired mobile location player Verve in January, is creating a separate business unit for its ad tech assets. The new unit, announced on Tuesday, is called Verve Group, and comes along with a mini reorg. Sameer Sondhi, previously SVP and GM of global business development […]
When Shpock, a European shopping app, started using search behavior to inform its ad targeting this year rather than just relying on demo data, it began to realize what its users were actually interested in. “For many years, demographic targeting was one of the main options used by brands and agencies alike,” said Jon Hatfield, […]
Without a way to calculate ad revenue per user, optimization is just an educated guessing game. “I wouldn’t call it a complete blind spot, but the process is definitely not as efficient as it could be,” said Jeff Gurian, VP of marketing and ad monetization at Kongregate, a mobile and PC game publisher acquired from […]
When DoorDash partnered with The Cheesecake Factory in December to give away 10,000 free slices of cheesecake, the food delivery app set up a cross-functional war room to deal with the logistical complexity. Free food is always a strong customer acquisition tool, but if marketing pushes an offer and product isn’t in the loop, users […]
“You can never go home again” doesn’t apply to the home screen. Most smartphone users – 98%, according to mobile attribution provider TUNE – have reinstalled an app that they previously deleted. Forty percent of users delete and reinstall apps on a regular basis. But most app marketers don’t differentiate between first-time downloads and re-downloads, mainly because […]
Apple is reportedly headed once more into the fray with the launch of a contextual ad network that could include inventory from Pinterest, Snap and a collective of other apps in the App Store. The move, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, may seem strange in light of macro events like Facebook’s data scandal […]
Apple just made a move under the radar that could cause third-party attribution providers to become obsolete. In late March, Apple quietly released SKAdNetwork, an API for iOS 11.3 that allows ad networks or advertisers to directly attribute installs from the App Store without relying on an attribution vendor. Apple’s well-documented stance on consumer privacy […]
This is the first in a series of deep dives from AdExchanger on mobile fraud and mobile data quality, including guides to fraud tactics and threat vectors and practical solutions from advertisers in the growth and user acquisition trenches. Read the second story (“Mobile Data Has A Quality Control Problem“) and the third (“Anatomy Of […]
Back when real-time auction app Tophatter was founded in 2012, it spent as much as 95% of its user acquisition budget on Facebook. But with a solid user base of around 12 million registered users, it’s been making a concerted effort to mix up its UA strategy. “In the beginning, Facebook was a big gorilla, but […]
Developers like Lucktastic, a F2P sweepstakes app, play a seemingly never-ending game of balancing quality vs. scale when acquiring users. Increasingly, they’re turning to mobile video and playable ads to find users who stick around after the install. “In a category like ours, you need scale to succeed, but we also really have to care […]
Grabr is an ecommerce app for the stuff you can’t usually find online. “You can think about us as the Airbnb for international shopping and delivery,” said Daria Rebenok, CEO of Grabr, a peer-to-peer marketplace that aims to help travelers make a little extra cash by acting as couriers for difficult-to-obtain items from anywhere in […]
