Y Combinator-backed Tenjin helps developers identify ad campaigns with the best ROI

There are a multitude of tools made available to marketers, but one annoying problem is that there are too many tabs and applications to use. Isn’t there a way to streamline everything and still give brands the data needed to determine the success of their strategies? Tenjin is launching today with the aim of solving this problem and helping marketers better discover their Return on Investment (ROI).

A member of Y Combinator’s summer 2014 batch, Tenjin automates the process that performance marketers have traditionally handled when dealing with multiple services, such as analytics platforms, attribution partners, ad servers, and others.

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Typically, all of the data from these sources would be aggregated by marketers and placed into an Excel spreadsheet to determine the ROI. A complex process to be sure, but Tenjin says it will not only automate the input and analysis, but also show the break-even points for campaigns.

This isn’t a middleman platform that lets you manage all of the other services. Instead, Tenjin is a consolidator — it takes some of the best (and most commonly used) features across all aspects of ad-tech services and brings them into a single platform, such as ROI by source, 90-day lifetime value analytics, user time spent in an app, and more. Additionally, the company says it can tell you how you’re making money from a specific source using actual data (not predictive) which will help define where your money is going.

Tenjin’s cofounders, Amir Manji and Christopher Farm, came up with this marketing solution during their time at app monetization and mobile advertising firm Tapjoy. Farm told VentureBeat that people at Tapjoy developed a customized dashboard to streamline performance marketing analytics, but weren’t really using it. They were simply pulling the data and placing it onto a CSV file before importing it into their own systems for analysis.

Seeing this, Farm and Manji started Tenjin with one simple objective: help marketers calculate the ROI from their various ad-tech services.

Tenjin hasn’t formalized its pricing model yet and says that up to today, it’s been operating on a contract-by-contract basis. However, it’s looking to establish fees for monthly active users in line with those of analytic providers currently in the marketplace.

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As the service appears to offer a simplified model, it may not be suitable for all marketers. In fact, if your objectives include more than just determining ROI, then Tenjin may not be what you’re looking for. Additionally, although it supports 40 ad networks, including Chartboost, Tapjoy, Supersonic, Google AdWords, and YouTube, along with Flurry and others, your business may use additional services that are not supported by Tenjin. Lastly, marketers may feel that Tenjin isn’t powerful enough for their needs, especially since Tenjin has duplicated only some features from various ad-tech platforms.

But for those that really want to associate their revenue with specific campaigns, Tenjin’s offering may sound appealing. If you’re a developer, being able to track where every dollar is coming from is important, and Tenjin provides that specialized approach.

Tenjin is funded by Y Combinator and Lightbank, and includes participation from various angel investors.