How Adjust is Solving The Billion Dollar Question in Advertising

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It wasn’t surprising to see that once again, app fraud was one of the most talked about topics this week at the Mobile World Congress

And for good reasons too. Various companies have found that 5% of ad spend goes to fraudulent sources, which can impact a publishers bargaining power and credibility. While the value proposition for fraud prevention and waste reduction is clear, a solution of this magnitude may not have the apparent acceptance it so rightly deserves. To understand the go to market approach being used to fruition, I spoke to Adjust‘s Ender Ozcan, who leads the business in Turkey and now, the Middle East.

What has been the go to market plan for entering the Middle East and for taking ownership of the market?
We focus on our product work. In this type of analytics and data management, we have to handle very large amounts of data effectively (lately around 1.5 petabyte every 30 days), so it’s crucial that we have the skills and focus to build a reliable and robust, yet sophisticated product.

With most markets, we always hire support teams with specific language skills, like Chinese or Turkish. At the same time, it’s crucial for support teams to be based centrally, so our teams work out of Berlin with schedules adapted to the markets they serve.

These focuses have been extremely effective approaches when opening in US, China, Japan, Australia, and Turkey, and we will continue to maintain and scale the same strong and robust approach in our Mid East operations.

Key for an attribution partner like us is that we’re properly integrated with all of the local partners. For this purpose, we’ve built a high-speed, low-effort dynamic API which integrates partners on-the-fly, and we have a large integration team whose job it is to educate partners on how to use the API. Their focus as we open new markets is on building technical relationships with the right partners – and thanks to the API, we can progress on that very rapidly.

How has Adjust built and maintained relationships with publishers among others from e-commerce, banking and gaming?
You know, we started in Berlin working with a few choice clients here, making sure our product was up to scratch to serve their needs very closely. We’ve cautiously expanded the client base, always with a focus on the product and on serving the client’s needs. It’s always been priced accordingly.

These days, we continue to have a very high-touch relationship with core thought leaders in our client base, and the way their business develops influences our product directions directly. With the fraud prevention suite, this is something that’s been developed together with our clients – always streaming feedback from our account management teams to product teams.

What’s the scope of the fraud problem in the Middle East and what % of it does Adjust potentially have the ability to correct?
Our initial trial run, looking for anonymous IP’s, indicated that up to 2.5 % of all traffic acquired by our clients in the Middle East are coming from anonymized IP’s. The Middle Eastern countries were Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. It was a clear indicator of fraudulent traffic. That’s one filter, and an average across all campaign types.

This number will increase by an estimated ratio of three as we roll out further filters. Fraudulent traffic is also much more common in certain verticals and certain types of campaigns, as you can find in our recent press release.

What are the common misconceptions, questions and knowledge gaps that publishers have and what does Adjust do to proactively close the gaps?
We’re working on a lot of different projects we’re working on to make mobile marketing more informed and transparent. Most recently we put together the Mobile Benchmarks. A system like adjust produces comparable metrics for different segments within an app or for a specific company.

The benchmarks seek to answer the question – are those numbers good? Comparably to other app developers in certain regions or verticals? By releasing an entire data-set of averages across different verticals, anyone can place their metrics in context.

We’ve received a lot of great feedback on this, especially as we open-sourced the entire data-set. Looking forward to release a fresh data-set in March.

How does Adjust help its clients channel ad spend towards contextually relevant publishers and what has been the primary motivator for publisher acceptance of your tech?
Adjust provides developers with a clear dashboard showing KPI’s for every marketing channel. Developers check out specific KPI’s – conversion rates, retention metrics, or cohort performance – that show the effectiveness and relevance of their advertising per channel.

Once they have that data in front of them, they can clearly see which ads and which publishers are performing best, across their entire marketing spend.

Publishers often start out with individual ad networks, using that network’s reporting and their conversion SDK’s. But once you start using 2, 3 or multiple different networks, you rapidly need one centralized data provider. That’s where Adjust comes in.

Babar Khan Javed
Babar Khan Javed is a brand journalist. He is a post-graduate of "Squared", Google's highest qualification for marketing strategy. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Market Leader, Consulting Magazine, Global CMO and Brand Quarterly. He is interested in the dynamics of advertising including industry topics such as how media is being transformed by technology. He can only be reached at [email protected] and responds within 24 hours.

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