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Chartboost wants to be a game developer’s best friend. That’s why the company is introducing three new services today aimed at making developers more money. Those services include post-install analytics for mobile games, the ability to identify the advertising source for new customers, and the ability to match the right ad networks to the right mobile gamers.
Chartboost has seen great growth in the past few years. More than 200,000 Android and iOS mobile games uses its Chartboost software development kit (SDK), and its network now has more than 700 million monthly active users. It introduced a video ad product two quarters ago, and now 25 percent of its publishers use video today. Last month, video grew ads 77 percent. Now Chartboost is making use of all that data it has collected.
“Our new products will help developers on the publishing side maximize their revenues in an intelligent manner,” Kellogg said.
The company’s chief rival is the user acquisition business of Facebook, but Chartboost is focused much more on gaming customers. Chartboost was founded in 2011 as a discovery platform and monetization provider for game developers. It enabled them to bypass ad companies and swap traffic directly in order to promote each others’ games at very low user acquisition costs.
“We were founded on the values of transparency and the ability for developers to control their own destiny,” Kellogg said.
Chung-Man Tam, chief product officer at San Francisco-based Chartboost, said in an interview that the company is making use of data that it collects to help developers understand users better and to help advertisers figure out which ads and networks are working.
“We want to make sure that publishers are not just advertising blindly,” Kellogg said.
Post-install analytics are important because they tell what happens after the user installs a game. If lots of users quit at the same spot in a game, then Chartboost can tell the developer that the game has a flaw at that point. With post-install analytics, developers can also figure out who will stick around and spend money.
With Smart Bid, Chartboost enables developers to create a new type of campaign that has attribution data from partners such as Adjust and Kochava. Sometimes a developer will advertise through 250 channels at the same time. They may get a lot of users, but they may not know where those users came from. With attribution, it becomes a lot easier to figure out that task.
“Thanks to Smartbid, we can run scalable user acquisition campaigns at a reliable ROI with Chartboost,” said Jana Cieslik, marketing manager at GameDuell, a game developer that uses Chartboost. “With their new solution we are able to optimize our campaigns and reach the best possible results.”
The integration with attribution providers means that Chartboost will be able to identify problem ad networks and remove them.
“Customers have asked for this for some time,” Tam said.
The third new service is ad mediation support, to help manage the number of advertising providers. The company has partnered with providers such as Fyber, Mopub, Heyzap in the ad mediation business. Chartboost has 140 employees.
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