Upsight unveils real-time analytics and marketing platform for mobile and online marketers

Upsight is launching a new mobile marketing tool that lets marketers understand their users in real-time and create marketing campaigns to target them.

The Upsight Marketing product was more than a year in the making, and Upsight executives said it highlights the fact that mobile marketing and analytics have become a single, consolidated business that offers more convenient and powerful tools for mobile marketers and developers.

I saw a demo of the tool in action with a demo app with 22.5 million. You can immediately see 10 attributes of users, like how much money they’ve spent, the length of time they have used an app, what country they are from, and so on. The dashboard updated the numbers and bar charts in real time as Upsight’s Scott Brinkman, head of product, made changes to the data query. He narrowed down the search to drill down on a segment of 120 high-potential users and then target them with campaign messages. With this live analytics and marketing tool, you can quickly visualize user behavior and identify your most valuable segments, the company said.

“We let marketers understand their users in real time and take action,” said Josh Williams, chairman and chief technology officer at San Francisco-based Upsight, in an interview with VentureBeat. “They can see the results of their actions because of the power of our data platform. They can do experiments or portfolio-wide marketing campaigns or localized campaigns — and then give you the results in one dashboard.”

Upsight was formed more than a year ago through the merger of data analytics firm Kontagent and mobile marketer PlayHaven. Since that time, the company’s engineers have been working on melding the different tools into a single Upsight Marketing platform, with Upsight DataMine business intelligence tools built into it. It’s a radical simplification of the product, and it works for both mobile and online, Williams said.

Williams added, “There’s no delineation between analytics or reporting, or business intelligence or marketing tools. I don’t think there is anyone else out there that can do that. In the past, we couldn’t show this happening in real time.”

The product is targeted at enterprise customers who want more sophisticated solutions to manage their marketing campaigns. Marketers can use the different pieces of the tool, including User Explorer, which lets a marketer rapidly find an interesting segment of users and then understand how groups of users affect one another.

Brinkman said the tool can be used to distill 22.5 million users to the handful of people who are highly likely to convert to paid users. You can then create a targeted campaign for those users, offering a discount if they make a purchase. You can also test two different options, A/B testing, on a subset of users to figure out which kind of campaign works the best. The A/B testing is built into the product. Once the A/B test has a winner, you can deploy the campaign across the whole user base.

“One interesting outcome is that certain marketers are becoming increasingly sophisticated,” said Brian Howell, Upsight’s chief marketing officer. “Most companies now have more than one app. To get to the point where you can actually run campaigns across multiple apps and add enterprise-grade user controls required a rethinking of the architecture. We wanted to build a suite of tools that aided the contemporary mobile marketer.”

The Upsight Marketing platform will be rolled out to existing customers starting today. Upsight’s tools are used to monitor more than 500 billion data points per month across thousands of apps.

“We’ve been working on this for the last year, and we are excited to show it,” Williams said.