Tenjin introduces self-service mobile marketing platform for mobile apps and games

Tenjin is introducing a self-service platform for mobile app and game developers so they can track, analyze, and optimize their marketing campaigns.

In doing so, the San Francisco mobile marketing infrastructure company will be able to address a larger swath of developers. The company has added enhancements to its platform in mobile analytics, attribution (such as identifying the proper advertising source for an app install), and ad network data aggregation.

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It has also rolled out a new pricing structure to benefit small and mid-size app developers. The idea is to enable developers to get up and running with Tenjin in minutes.

“Our goal was to make our powerful, feature-rich platform more accessible than ever before,” said Christopher Farm, Tenjin co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “While large app developers have the resources to integrate multiple solutions, small and mid-sized developers have struggled to get insight across all of their campaign sources in one place. Our new self-service solution gives small and mid-sized developers easy, instant access to the infrastructure they need in order to compete with even the most sophisticated and resource-rich developers.”

Tenjin said analytics for up to 12 million events per month are now free, with each additional 1 million events costing $300. Tenjin’s ad spend and ad revenue applications programming interface (API) is available for $500 per month.

Developers also get access to the Tenjin DataVault, which offers a flexible, customizable data warehouse to provide direct access to user-level data. The company’s unlimited plan is available for $3,000 per month and offers unlimited historical data for use in the DataVault and unlimited events for Analytics.

Tenjin has grown quickly since its launch in August 2015. To date, the company has processed more than $200 million in total advertising spend and more than $40 million in total advertising revenue. It has also tracked more than 4 billion in-app events, and is currently tracking 20 million events every single day.

“Tenjin has proven to be a key piece to the growth of our app,” said Mai Ho, head of growth at Schoold, in a statement. “No other solution helps us tie all the pieces together in order to get such an accurate and comprehensible view of our app marketing costs, performance and overall return on investment. By making the Tenjin platform available on a self-service basis, they are leveling the playing field to help small and medium-sized app developers go head-to-head with their larger counterparts, and that will ultimately lead to more innovation, better user experiences, and faster growth for the entire ecosystem.”

Tenjin currently has 9 full-time employees (plus several other consultants and freelancers).

The company’s main competitor is Singular, in that both companies offer analytics, attribution and aggregation through a single dashboard. Singular doesn’t offer a data warehousing solution like Tenjin does with its DataVault product, which offers a flexible, customizable data infrastructure to give app marketers direct access to user-level data. Other rivals include Tune in in-app analytics and attribution.

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Farm and his cofounder, Amir Manji, previously worked together at Tapjoy. At that company and others, they came to see that there wasn’t an easy way to figure out the ROI for campaigns. If app makers know how much revenue a user generates in a lifetime (lifetime value), then they know how much they can spend acquiring that user.

Larger companies have the internal business intelligence infrastructure to handle this type of work, but smaller companies typically don’t. Tenjin gives its customers direct and configurable access to the data infrastructure, powering their dashboard as if it were their own. This allows developers to become more sophisticated, as their user acquisition efforts can scale without the need to build anything.

Tenjin went through the Y Combinator incubator in 2014, and its customers include Yelp, Dots, NaturalMotion, Big Blue Bubble, Schoold and dozens more. The company recently raised $2.5 million, and investors include NetEase Capital, the venture arm of Chinese game publisher NetEase; Y Combinator; Lightbank, and angel investors Eric Wu, David King, Herman Yang, and Waikit Lau.