San Francisco-based mobile-app measurement and advertising platform Flurry today announced the launch of Flurry Ad Analytics, an analytics service that measures the effectiveness of traffic-acquisition campaigns across mobile-ad networks.
The company, which began as an email app developer, has long planned to use the data drawn from its Flurry Analytics -- used by more than 70,000 companies across more than 190,000 applications -- to power advertising said Peter Farago, VP-marketing. The hope is that the new product, which allows app marketers to track traffic from campaigns against multiple networks including Apple iAd, Google's Admob and AppCircle, will remedy the issue that brands aren't investing in mobile advertising at the rate that users are consuming it.
According to the company's own data, 23% of a consumer's time each day is spent using apps (if they have an app-capable device), yet only 1% of ad dollars are spent in mobile advertising. The disparity, notes Farago, stems from a lack of infrastructure allowing marketers to target their mobile-ad buy.
Until now, mobile advertising has been bought across a series of networks, which means that marketers must cobble together an audience from a number of different ad platforms. In data provided by Flurry, Google accounts for 26% of acquisition traffic, while its own platform, AdSpot, provides 13% and Apple's iAd accounts for 10%.
But by buying from so many sources, brands are often left to question whether the acquisitions they receive are of value to the brand and its success metrics.
Ad Analytics automatically tracks clicks and installations and attributes them to the correct campaigns and traffic sources. It then allows marketers to view the behavior of users after they download. For example, marketers can compare the 30-day user retention across campaigns or networks.
"Flurry estimates that during 2012 app marketers will spend more than $1 billion worldwide on app-traffic acquisition without the ability to measure user quality, assign attribution or easily determine ROI," said Simon Khalaf, Flurry president and chief executive, in a statement. "Flurry Ad Analytics empowers app marketers to change the way they think about acquisition and focus on quality not just quantity."
In addition, marketers can define how they want to measure user quality -- including by demographics, amount of usage or purchase behavior -- giving brands better control of their campaigns and the ability to tailor their buys for their best results.
Users being tracked on Ad Analytics include those coming from Apple devices. Although Apple has come under fire for limiting developers' ability to track iPhone users who downloaded their apps, Flurry says that it causes no issues for its new product. The company has its own identification system to determine if consumer clicks on an ad to ensure that the product is accurately measuring clicks and conversions.
