German startup adeven today announced a seven figure Series A investment from Munich VC firm Target Partners. The financing round will help adeven open two new offices in New York and San Francisco, adding to its existing presence in Berlin and London. The company also has big plans on the product side, where it hopes to address what co-founders Christian Henschel and Paul H. Müller identified as key deficiencies in how mobile ad campaigns are run and analyzed during their extensive experience in the worlds of online advertising and mobile development.
Henschel, also adeven’s CEO, comes from an advertising background, having previously worked with European mobile advertising marketplace madvertise, and at other companies in the advertising field before that. He told BetaKit in an interview that in all his time working in advertising, he was struck by how little progress has been made in what kind of information is delivered to advertisers to help them track their campaign’s success.
“One thing that really annoys me is that as an advertiser, even if you spend say €500,000, all that you get in exchange for that is reporting with clicks, impressions, and when the campaign was running,” he explained. “That’s basically all you have. In 2001, that’s okay, but in 2011-12, there’s so much data and information that’s available, why don’t we just hand it over to agencies and clients?”
Henschel said that adeven was founded on the idea that both advertisers and publishers deserved greater transparency when it came to reporting information from more data points. The result is that adeven can provide much better information about how campaigns are doing, and how they should be altered or managed differently in the future.
One example of the kind of data adeven provides its advertisers is the time that it takes for an impression to lead to a click. It may seem like a small thing, but it’s a great way for companies to quickly filter quality clicks from automated or accidental ones, since if a click comes immediately following an impression, it’s unlikely that an actual user has had time to even read an ad or digest its content. “If you know that as advertiser, you can discount those clicks and improve your performance later on,” Henschel said.
Henschel said one of adeven’s biggest strengths is its technology, since unlike on the web, identifying the kinds of activity that advertisers are interested in is challenging. Luckily, through testing of the platform via co-founder Müller’s company Rapidrabbit, which has brought in over 10 million downloads of its iOS (adeven is iOS-only for now, but will move to Android as well by the end of the year) apps, adeven has been able to refine its approach to mobile advertising analytics, and continues to do so.
According to Henschel, adeven is one of very few companies that offer this level of transparency and coverage for both publishers and advertisers on a mobile platform. He cites Google Analytics as probably their biggest competition, but believes adeven will eventually provide advertisers, agencies and publishers with a much clearer picture not only of the data, but of what the data means.
Henschel admits that expanding to the North American market will be a challenge, but also says its too good of an opportunity to pass up. With its new funding and a wide install base (through Müller’s app publishing company) from which to test additions to its platform, without having to depend on using paying customers for experimentation of new features, it’s in a good place to attempt more international growth.