Clicktale acquires FlightRecorder in readiness for mobile push at MWC 2016

Clicktale has announced today the acquisition of FlightRecorder, as it gears up to launch a new product at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week.

Founded in 2006, Clicktale is a conversion rate optimization tool (CRO) that allows its customers to understand how visitors use their websites. The company has raised $58 million to date, and its technology tracks every mouse move, click, and scroll. Its customers can create visual heat maps as well as behavioral reports, and the solution provides conversion analytics, helping marketers and developers improve desktop and mobile websites, incrementally.

FlightRecorder takes a different approach by providing an SDK that gives similar feedback to Clicktale, but within iOS and Android apps. Along with the likes of Appsee, it is often described as “the Clicktale of apps” in Q&A sites and forums. Founded in 2014 by CEO Can Abacigil and chief financial officer Omer Erkmen, FlightRecorder has offices in San Francisco and in Istanbul, Turkey.

The acquisition is tactical for Clicktale, which will use FlightRecorder as the basis for its Clicktale for Apps product, officially launching next week at MWC. So how do you acquire a technology and integrate it into your product within a week? You don’t — Clicktale has been using the FlightRecorder SDK under white label for some time.

“Clicktale evaluated several companies in this space, and has been using FlightRecorder’s SDK since August 2015,” Tuval Chomut, chief operating officer at Clicktale told me. “The FlightRecorder SDK will remain available to all FlightRecorder’s paying customers as we transition post-acquisition and integrate our two technologies.”

Clicktale for Apps will work for both native and hybrid apps, and includes features such as user session replays, crash reports, data insights, mobile analytics, and heat maps. It will be offered as an all-in-one SDK for iOS and Android. The tool, just like FlightRecorder before it, is quick to deploy, so developers start to see data within minutes.

Marketers and developers will enjoy access to the data provided by the product too, and not just for CRO purposes.

When the tool creates a crash report, it shows the exact line in the code in which a crash occurred, as well as providing the ability to drill down into session replays to view the experience of the user leading up to the crash. Once the fix has been made available, it offers push notifications that can send targeted messages to affected users, encouraging them to come back and try the updated app.

This latest acquisition in the CRO industry is notable for its focus on mobile apps, an industry that could double to $101 billion by 2020, according to App Annie. It is an area we’ll discuss at length next week during Marketing.FWD, and later in the year at Mobile Summit. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.