Upsight gains in quest to be the mobile marketing-analytics service that rules them all

Just weeks after offering a joint product from the merger of PlayHaven and Kontagent, the newly renamed Upsight is announcing today that it has gained good momentum.

Above: Josh Williams

Image Credit: Upsight

Upsight now tracks more than 500 billion events a month across 1.2 billion devices after it combined the mobile marketing services of PlayHaven with the analytics tools of Kontagent. The two companies merged in December and rebranded as Upsight in March.

A couple of months ago, Upsight had 22,000 apps with 650 million monthly active users. Now it has more than 700 million monthly active users in 25,000 apps.

Josh Williams, chairman and chief technology officer of San Francisco-based Upsight, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the premise of the merger is holding up. Developers are using the company’s analytics to gain deeper understanding of users, and then they’re using PlayHaven’s mobile marketing services to send custom communications to those users to improve retention and monetization.

“We’ve added 10 percent more growth in apps since we combined,” Williams said. “We’re offering the one-stop shop, and that’s what customers want.”

Before the merger, customers had to turn to different solutions from multiple vendors to accomplish the same thing.

Among its mobile publishers and indie developers are Backflip Studios, Black Tie Ventures, Changyou, Gamehouse Studios, NHN Entertainment Labs, and SkyVu Entertainment.

Andy Yang, chief executive of Upsight, said in an earlier interview that his company wanted to create one self-service software development kit (SDK) “to rule them all.”

“App developers are flocking to Upsight because we offer a comprehensive platform that eliminates unnecessary SDK integrations and because they need a platform that can scale rapidly,” said Andy Yang, CEO of Upsight, in a statement. “We track several times the amount of data compared with the competition and we’ve proven that we can scale with our customers while offering them a dedicated team of experts.”

Market researcher Yankee Group said its latest decision-maker survey shows that nearly two-thirds of enterprises engage customers via mobile apps.

“User engagement is the key for a successful mobile marketing strategy,” said Raúl Castañón-Martínez, senior analyst at Yankee Group. “This requires powerful analytics solutions, but companies do not want to deal with complicated integration to multiple data sources. End-to-end solutions are well-positioned to meet the needs of companies interested in understanding and driving user engagement on mobile applications.”

Williams said Upsight has a new feature dubbed “custom segmentation,” which targets users with relevant engagement and monetization campaigns. Those segmentations can be based on things like location, language, connection type, game version, hardware, number of sessions, last session, time in game, amount spent, first session, and operating system version.

Upsight has 140 employees.