Mobile ad exchange, Mobclix, announced the acquisition of mobile analytics firm, Heartbeat, on Monday. (Read more.) Also, last week, Mobclix released results of “The Mobclix Challenge,” a performance comparison between MobClix and Google-owned mobile ad network, AdMob. See it here.
Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of Mobclix, discussed the Heartbeat acquisition as well as the Challenge.
Prior to the Heartbeat acquisition, at some point, you must have considered building a revenue tracking application. What are the complexities that convinced you to buy not build?
Developers had a consistent need for a solution to track revenue across paid applications. For Mobclix, it was choosing whether or not to build this ourselves or buy something. That choice came down to time to market. By partnering with Heartbeat, we were able to not only get well-developed software but also a loyal following of developers (3500 developers). Heartbeat is a complete business dashboard for paid applications, including sales reports, instant usage data, crash reporting, payment management, reviews and ratings. Paired with our analytics and advertising options, the combination creates a true one-stop-shop for developers managing their applications.
Where do your mobile advertisers stand with effective attribution modeling for mobile today?
Mobile marketers are getting smarter in terms of ROI and backing all their media buys into an eCPA. Advertisers need to know how much it will cost them for a new user whether they’re using backend metrics, iTunes connect or a sophisticated dashboard like Mobclix that makes real-time analysis much easier. With Heartbeat, marketers can optimize campaigns across networks.
How will you maintain “church and state” with the acquisition of Heartbeat? Isn’t there a potential of a conflict of interest in knowing what products are selling and also enabling the buying and selling of advertising, which sell those products?
We only work directly with ad networks, as opposed to working directly with advertisers or brands. Even if a developer were to do an ad buy for his application, it would go through an ad network, not just through us.
Looking at your data from the Challenge, why is Mobclix outperforming AdMob?
Mobclix is an ad exchange that allows multiple ad networks to compete for ad inventory – this competition leads to higher fill rates and maximizes eCPM. Essentially an app developer can leverage the sales team of 20 ad networks vs a single ad network. Any given ad network cannot fill 100% inventory which accounts for a loss in ad revenue for the developer. Mobclix allows developers to manage fluctuating sales cycles of ad sales teams, enabling them to tap into premium campaigns from multiple networks.
How important is the creative to mobile ad performance? Was it the same for both platforms in this test?
Creative saturation has quickly become an issue in the mobile space. Show the same users the same creative over and over again and of course the CTR will drop. The same ad unit size was used for the test: 300×50. The creatives varied by advertisers varied from network to network.
In a nutshell, how is Mobclix’s exchange model different than AdMob’s ad network model?
Mobclix allows ad networks to reach targeted inventory across mobile apps.We leverage our analytics data to give ad networks as much insight as possible to help increase campaign performance. Mobclix and Admob do not have competing products but compete for the same end customer. In both cases developers receive the same rev share from ad networks – it’s the increased CPM and near 100% fill rate that makes a tremendous difference in revenue for developers using Mobclix.
By John Ebbert
