The Dutch app analytics company Distimo has built a reputation around offering app developers a cross-platform look at how their apps are performing in terms of downloads, revenues and rankings, covering 2.6 billion downloads per quarter, some 15-20% of the overall download market, across 180,000 apps and 10 app stores (including Apple App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, BlackBerry World, and Windows Phone/Windows Store). Now it is taking its product to a new level. From today, Distimo is now also pitching its analytics service to large enterprises and brands that also create consumer-focused apps. It is kicking off the new business line with an integration with Adobe, which will be including Distimo’s data as part of its wider Adobe Analytics dashboard.
Vincent Hoogsteder, the CEO and co-founder of Distimo, said in an interview earlier that the move to offer Distimo analytics as an enterprise-focused product is a sign of how the app market has changed. While there has always been a mix of small developers and larger brands and enterprises targeting consumers with apps, it is only now that larger enterprises have started to take the space more seriously, with the idea that the performance of their apps can be used to measure how well their brands are performing.
“What you see is that we are gradually moving into a more mature app market and so we see huge potential [to target] enterprise guys,” he explained. “We see a lot of them in our analytics and going into the app market, so we built an API to serve them.”
Adobe, he notes, is the first to integrate this into its dashboard, but it won’t be the only one. The enterprise push is coming in the form of an API that will be made available to others. “We will have more partnerships in the coming months,” he said, and they will not just be focused on the “big guys”, but also small and medium-sized business and other kinds of “enterprises” — in short, the wide range of companies that have taken to apps as a route to reaching their customers. “We want to be the data pipeline for the app environment,” he said. Adobe came first, he noted, because the two already had mutual customers who were asking for the integration.
Adobe Analytics tracks things like web presence, the performing of marketing campaigns and conversions on ads. Adding in Distimo metrics on downloads and store rankings will give enterprises a bigger picture of how they are faring in their digital marketing strategies.
“The power of Adobe Analytics combined with Distimo’s app store data will enable our mutual customers to analyze and sync their app store data along with app engagement and usage data collected by Adobe Analytics,” said Roger Woods, senior product manager, mobile solutions at Adobe, in a statement. “Our decision to integrate Distimo’s app store data aligns with our commitment to help marketers make data-driven decisions that drive higher marketing ROI.”
The one area that Distimo covers in its metrics that is unlikely to be as important to enterprises are app revenues. App revenues, as measured by Distimo’s AppIQ metric, are a key area for developers, but not so much for brands and enterprises, who view apps more as marketing than direct lines of business, for now at least. One area that Distimo also tracks in its basic package is the performance of ads in mobile apps: this is something that will also eventually get rolled into the enterprise product, although taking a different form, Hoogsteder said. The intention, however, is not to compete directly against a company like Flurry, which also offers an extensive amount of data both on mobile ads and app analytics.
More to the point, it is likely to add more app stores into the mix, with Firefox called out as one specific store that may get added soon.
Distimo’s basic business model is to making revenue on providing competitive intelligence to developers about how well others in the same space are performing — the basic information around your own downloads, revenues and app store rankings are free. This will be the basic model applied to the enterprise offering, too, with the competitive intelligence again coming at a price. Pricing and conversion of users from free to paid do not get disclosed by Distimo, but he noted that “take-up is higher than we expected. Developers need this kind of data to improve their business.”
Looking ahead, this move into enterprise is the latest expansion for Distimo, which is also establishing offices in San Francisco, New York and Asia as it continues to grow. The company has been self-funded and bootstrapped from the start — it started out as four developers frustrated with the lack of data they needed to improve their own mobile apps — and with the company profitable, for now Hoogsteder says that there are no plans to raise money externally, or look to get acquired. “We’re just getting started and we want to build a long-lasting company,” he said.
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