Quixey unveils dynamic ad cards that pull data from apps

Mobile tech company Quixey is today releasing a new dynamic mobile ad format that shows the latest data from apps.

Users don’t need the apps to see the format, called Deep View Cards. They enable a travel company, for instance, to display the latest info on room availability in a given resort — info that otherwise is buried deep inside the travel company’s app.

A click on the card brings the consumer to that screen in the app. If the consumer doesn’t have that app, they can be sent to an app store and, after the app is installed, it opens directly to that screen. Alternatively, they can be sent to a mobile website instead of the app store, or the app publisher can give that choice to the user.

The new format extends Quixey’s experience as a “search engine for apps,” able to find apps as the result of a natural language search, or to find info within apps.

CEO and cofounder Tomer Kagan told me that the Cards have been running for six months as a white-labeled product on the mobile web or in apps, without Quixey’s name on it. But now, he said, “we’re going to start taking credit,” such as by having a Quixey logo on the Cards.

During the white-labeling phase, he said, the Cards showed about a 150 percent improvement on clickthrough rates compared to static text ads, and conversion rates that were as much as three times higher. The company claims it has already served more than 300 million Cards, and that over 60 million impressions are being served monthly.

The reason for the performance improvement, Kagan said, is that the info is more up-to-date and specific. It’s the difference between, say, an ad encouraging you to “get tickets for a local sporting event,” and an ad that has the specific availability for seats at tonight’s San Francisco Giants game.

The Cards can mimic an app’s look and feel, or the look and feel of a publisher’s site or app, such as in a Facebook News Feed or inside a CNN story, so they can act as native ads. A key advantage compared with other ad formats, Kagan said, is that the Cards can generate up-to-date ads at scale.

The app-based information is kept current through a Quixey web crawler, APIs to the apps, and proprietary App Mining tech.

Along with announcement of the format, the Mountain View, California-based Quixey is also announcing partnerships with publishers like Times Internet from India; with advertisers on Twitter through Flightly; and with ad platform Alephic, Chinese online giant Alibaba, and mobile ad platforms Opera and PocketMath.