Mobile analytics and ad firm Flurry says that its targeted advertising platform is getting very good results for some of its advertisers and publishers — especially when it comes to users spending money.
In four months, Flurry said it has proven its programmatic matchmaking of publishers and advertisers thanks to the power of data. The San Francisco-based company has now published a couple of case studies that show the results.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":813779,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,mobile,","session":"D"}']CrossInstall, a demand-side platform (ad buyer), uses Flurry’s data to find the users most likely to download a certain type of app. They use their A/B testing to target ads. The result is that the targeted ads produced 40 percent more conversions — or users downloading an app — than normal. On top of that, CrossInstall reduced its media-buying costs by bidding only on ad impressions that were likely to convert. Return on investment improved threefold on ad campaigns.
“We have been talking about data impacting advertising for some time,” said Flurry chief executive Simon Khalaf in an interview with VentureBeat. “After four months after our launch of our real-time bidding marketplace, we have the living proof. It’s changing advertising dynamics and making it highly effective.”
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Jeff Marshall, the chief executive of CrossInstall, said, “Flurry is a force to be reckoned with and will soon operate the leading mobile marketplace. We know it works because it works for us: Flurry data enables better and smarter buying decisions.”
Flurry has created Flurry Personas, or categories of gamers or app users. Advertisers can now target their ads to specific types of users. The real-time bidding provides automated, efficient matchmaking for advertisers, and the analytics provides precision targeting, Khalaf said.
The company is using the advanced matchmaking and targeting in more than 2,500 applications and 30 demand-side platforms (ad buyers), going from zero to 250 million daily ad impressions in four months.
“We achieved scale and quality in a very short period of time,” Khalaf said. “That means the vision of bringing precision targeting to advertising works.”
Other companies are working on this kind of technology as well, such as Facebook and other mobile monetization firms.
A real-time bidding marketplace has a buyer and a seller. The seller of ad inventory is a Flurry publisher, or a mobile game or app publisher that uses Flurry’s analytics, and that publisher can turn on a flag inside an app. The platform sends an ad request comes into the Flurry Marketplace, or ad network, and Flurry sends the request out to demand-side platforms, or buyers of ads, in real time. The buyer looks at the flag from the publisher and decides whether the seller is a good match.
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Above: The old way of doing a marketplace.
The buyer learns whether that app is enjoyed by a certain kind of Flurry Persona, like a food and wine traveler, or a casual gamer. If the audience for that app is a good match, the buyer will then buy the ad inventory. All of this happens in an automated fashion. In fact, about 95 percent of the transactions are automated.
“The demand side platforms are no longer blind,” Khalaf said. “In a precision way, they can now make a smart buy instead of a blind buy. That is a change in the operation of the marketplace. It shows that data matters. This is the living proof that Flurry is making a huge difference.”
A publisher, iLegendSoft, has more than 50 apps in the iOS and Android app stores. It used Flurry’s real-time bidding marketplace, turning it on with a few clicks. Without any integration work, iLegendSoft used the marketplace opened up the ad inventory in its apps to thousands of advertisers who were competing in real-time for each of its impressions.
iLegendSoft saw its ad revenues triple, as advertisers bid prices upward because of the more precise audience targeting. There were no extra additional data or ad serving fees.
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“Flurry Marketplace delivers eCPMs that are three times greater than my other monetization channels,” said Jiqun Zheng, the chief executive of iLegendSoft. “I will continue allocating more and more inventory to their RTB solution.”
It still takes some technical integration work to get the Flurry Marketplace to work with demand-side platforms, Khalaf said, so it is not completely automated yet. It takes about a week to get the “plumbing” working with the system. But much of the work once done by humans, such as putting filters in place to cut out porn advertisers and such, is automated.
In other news Flurry appointed a new chief financial officer, Bob Komin, yesterday. The company reaches 1.2 billion unique monthly smartphone and tablet devices. Komin has 28 years of finance experience and was most recently CFO at Ticketfly. He was also chief operating officer and CFO at Linden Lab.
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