June 11, 2014
Facebook App install advertisements are slowly becoming an old familiar in your app based news feed, carefully honed by Facebook’s famous targeting tools. Personally I can vouch for their effectiveness of targeting (unlike the time I got an email from Pinterest about “planning my big day” and links to wedding dress boards) having never really seen a recommended app that wasn’t to my taste, whether I chose to install or otherwise. But with Facebook advertising being the paid social MVP could there really be a serious rival in the market?
That’s where Chartboost comes in. Chartboost is a San Francisco based tech start up specialising in app install and engagement marketing. Bringing new strategies such as “direct deal developer marketplaces”, and “developer friending”, could it’s USP differentiations pose it as a serious threat to the social heavyweight?
Chartboost host an array of strategies that place its service leagues above its mainstream competitors. Chartboost’s main idea is to create a direct deal market place between app developers. What does this mean though? A direct deal market place is a place to encourage a reduction in hostility between competitors and increase more of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” mentality among the industry community. Developers can now come to agreements to advertise their apps within each other’s apps coined as “developer friending”, essentially bringing the company out of the ballpark at an early stage.
Leaving the ballpark and being a bystander to organic customer-to-customer relationships could ring alarm bells, but Chartboost have such great faith in their product they believe that due to the rapid development of the industry repeat ad purchase is almost inevitable in line with this development. Could this faith and trust placed in its customers be another jewel in its crown in the form of brand loyalty and retention?
As much as the service in itself is impressive, could its analytics also be the thing that set it apart? Facebook analytics currently go beyond initial install with advertisers able to set key action points on which to push out to users such as complete a certain level, make an in-app purchase etc., whereas Chartboost go one step further, with less direct action based milestones.
Chartboost enables developers to reach out on less distinct milestones such as average length of single gameplays, recency of use and most app opens. Customers can then bucket by these much more granular metrics and target accordingly.
Chartboost Chief Revenue Officer Clay Kellogg states “I think Facebook has proven that this pie is larger than anyone had imagined” Could it be that Chartboost’s potential success is going to lie in the fact they are munching on the slices Facebook is simply too full to take a bite of?
Watch this space.
Header & Featured Image credits: Chartboost