Mobile marketer Fetch adds tool to better connect paid ads with what users do

Today, mobile marketing agency Fetch launched its latest tool in the data wars – a dashboard called FetchMe that is designed to find which media buys and other activities are most effective in generating specific user behavior, like installing an app.

It does this by automatically combining those two factors – what users are doing with how they were acquired by the brand – including how much that acquisition cost. For instance, it might show that mobile browser ads had the biggest impact on getting users to install apps, but only in specific morning hours.

“Both of these things existed before [as data], but we couldn’t query them both at the same time,” Fetch head of data and operations Dan Wilson told VentureBeat.

Before FetchMe, he said, those “two sides of the coin” – the connections between what is driving users to what they’re doing – would “have been hand-built manually” in Fetch’s system, he said.

“Now, you press a couple of buttons.”

Above: A screen from FetchMe, comparing media against sales

Image Credit: Fetch

FetchMe, which was built over two years, analyzes over a billion interactions a month across a hundred countries. Data includes changes in user behavior, engagement rates, and conversions.

The tool has discovered, for instance, that cost-per-app-install (CPI) rates have been increasing since January, with a big spike in October. It also shows which countries have the highest CPI rates – Australia, Ireland, and Norway – while the U.S., Canada, China, France, and Brazil have median rates.

Wilson pointed to one unnamed Fetch client “in the travel vertical” who used FetchMe and discovered that app-engagement responses to paid ads and notifications were different in the early morning and late afternoon.

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Paid media in the 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. timeslot, he said, resulted in high levels of responses like checking out or installing apps, but less so for engagement with the app, like using it or responding to in-app ads.

But the response to paid media in the 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. slot was the opposite – “less open to [paid media encouraging app] installs, but more open” to in-app purchasing and other in-app behavior, Wilson told us.

Media in that later time slot, such as ads or push notifications, would therefore be more effective if they were more oriented toward encouraging that kind of app behavior, he said.

Wilson noted that other mobile marketing agencies “have the same challenges,” but Fetch’s approach stands out because the connection between media and behavior is now being made automatically.

Earlier this month, the Dentsu Aegis network of media agencies purchased the London-based Fetch, which also has offices in San Francisco, Berlin, and Hong Kong. Although no purchase price was announced, AdAge estimated it was about $48 million.

(Disclosure: Fetch owns a less-than-0.5 percent stake in VentureBeat.)