Berlin-based mobile ad and app analytics startup adeven today announced that it has raised a $4.3 million Series B funding round, provided by Capnamic Ventures, Iris Capital and existing investor Target Partners. The company plans to use the funding to help it continue to expand its product offerings, with the ultimate goal of focusing on the new metrics dealing with long-term engagement and customer retention that go beyond the once all-important install numbers.
Another goal for adeven, which has done much in the past year including launching two products, adjust.io (an app tracking tool and KPI analytics platform), as well as apptrace (iOS app and publisher metric platform), adding on over 80 million daily active users during the most recent month, and tracking 500 million sessions in May (which is 300 percent growth month-to-month). Right now, the team is heads down on the adjust.io launch, but there’s plenty more in the pipeline, including continued international market growth, hence the new round.
“The first phase of mobile advertising was really focusing on downloads, so were you could basically buy the cheapest downloads,” adeven co-founder and CEO Christian Henschel explained in an interview, describing adeven’s focus. “What we see now is that a lot of clients of ours are really starting to focus on what actually happens after a download; do the users ever open an app, what do they do within an app, and how long does it take before they first make an in-app purchase. Those kinds of metrics are very, very important.”
Henschel says that a lot of customers these days, especially those in ecommerce, don’t care at all about cost per download anymore. After, if you’re paying less than a dollar per download, but those customers end up not even opening the app, then you’re not building a business; much better to pay more, say $5 or $6 per download, and land someone who’ll not only actually open your app, but keep coming back to it to spend money. Adeven’s product focus is on helping publishers identify and enable that kind of long-tail activity.
Where adeven can help with this more than its competitors is in the background of the founding team, Henschel says. Most other companies in this space come from an affiliate marketing or advertising background, while the adeven co-founders, especially Paul Muller and Manuel Kniep, have a background more on the product side and lots of experience actually building mobile apps. That’s what positions them better in terms of understanding the needs of their customers, Henschel says.
Going forward, adeven will be setting up its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco beginning in September or October, and is also looking into France and other new markets. It’s also putting more resources into its sales force and tech team on the hiring side, and has some big plans on the product side to help simplify the lives of developers who currently have to log into multiple different dashboards and integrate various SDKs to track all the metrics they want to watch. Adeven hopes to eventually deliver a single SDK, with a single dashboard to help its clients focus on the right KPIs, and will continue to build towards that goal.