Adjust is a global player in mobile measurement, fraud prevention, and cybersecurity. Created at the heart of the mobile economy and grown out of a passion for technology, the globally operating company now has 16 offices around the world. By making marketing simpler, smarter and more secure, Adjust empowers data-driven marketers to build the most successful apps in the world.
Medianews4u caught up with Shubham Jha, Sales Manager India at Adjust to understand more about Adjust, its offerings and the way forward for mobile marketers.
Read on.
Tell us about Adjust and its core competencies? How was Adjust created and what with vision?
Adjust was founded in Berlin in 2012 by our CEO, Christian Henschel, Paul H. Müller (now Adjust’s CTO) and Manuel Kniep (our Lead Developer). Prior to Adjust, Christian had been working in digital marketing for over a decade – that’s where he realized how difficult it was to measure the results of advertising campaigns, especially on mobile.
Christian then met Paul, who at the time was a successful app developer. Paul was experiencing the same problem, and wanted to know where his app users came from. He had developed his own tracking and analytics solution to find out. It was immediately clear to the two of them that this could fix a widely-spread issue in the industry and be the start of something big.
In just seven years, Adjust has developed into one of the largest tech success stories in Europe, and today employs over 450 people in 16 offices worldwide. Our primary goal is to help clients build the most successful apps in the world – and we do that by providing the highest quality analytics and measurement capabilities. Essentially, that means we help brands to understand where their app users are coming from, and how they interact with their product once the app is installed.
By connecting the whole user journey, brands can then optimize performance. They gain valuable insights into which campaigns are resonating with consumers, which ad networks are performing the best, and how to spend their marketing budget for the best return on investment (ROI). Most importantly, marketers’ decisions are based on data that is comprehensive, accurate and free of advertising fraud.
Along with measurement, Adjust’s platform includes fraud prevention, cybersecurity and marketing automation products. Together, they make marketing simpler, smarter and more secure for our clients.
Which are some of the top clients that you service?
To date, more than 32,000 apps work with Adjust. We have a very diverse portfolio of clients, serving multinational companies, as well as up-and-coming start-ups. Just some of the brands we work with globally include Procter & Gamble, Traveloka and Dominos. Indian clients such as BankBazaar, Circle, QuackQuack, Pocket Aces and FreshtoHome, to name a few, have all implemented our solutions to foolproof their budgets and improve their marketing results.
What we’ve seen with many of our clients is that they have started to use Adjust not just as an attribution provider, but as a holistic solution for all their mobile performance marketing needs. The data they receive from Adjust becomes their source of independent verification, and they use it to cross-check other data sources and fuel business decisions across departments.
What is the scope for mobile marketing in the upcoming time with the aggressive roll-out of 5G?
Faster internet speeds will benefit business at large, facilitating more digital exchanges and transactions across industries. Marketers and advertisers are among those who can benefit the most with this new technology.
From a technical standpoint, 5G will reduce load times and lower latencies when consumers click on ads then click to install. Better mobile infrastructure also means that technologies powering creativity like automation and virtual reality will come into the mainstream. We will also see growth in IoT applications, enabling app marketers to understand the needs of their users much better and improve on app monetisation strategy.
5G will also mean more browsing, in-app time and swiping. People will consume more content faster. More screen time means more opportunities, especially when they can consume content on the move, which is an ongoing problem in rural India.
The number of mobile users will grow and drive more traffic. This will lead to growth in the amount of data available to marketers, and more personalized content can be developed.
Could you highlight a few mobile marketing trends that can be helpful for readers?
We predict a seismic shift in mobile measurement, campaign management, cybersecurity and marketing automation in 2020. You might even say it will be the year that MarTech re-architects mobile marketing as we know it. Late last year, Adjust’s founders, Christian and Paul, articulated what they see as the trends for 2020. Here are the highlights:
Context will be king — and automation will do the heavy lifting. With consumer demand for personalized content reaching an all-time high, 2020 will see new talent join the effort in the form of increased and highly-sophisticated marketing automation. Marketers will be left to focus on the creative dimension, but the “who” and “when” will be decisions driven by data. The outcome will be a better experience for consumers, who will receive context-based offers and advertising, and marketers, who will benefit from increased conversion and retention rates.
Product and Marketing will converge to reinvent the app experience.2020 will see organizations take serious action to break down the silos between Product and Marketing. While the primary goal of ad campaigns is to fill the marketing funnel, the data that Marketing gleans from these campaigns — such as features users love, points in the journey where they feel frustration or simply requirements for fresh content — can help shape product strategy. Equipped with these insights, Product can iterate and design an app experience that will encourage frequent use, and drive the familiarity that boosts brand recognition and trust.
In-app bot attacks will taint app experience and tarnish brand integrity. Expect in-app bot fraud to be a moving target in 2020 and beyond. Bot attacks will spread as cybercriminals shift tactics and platforms. But while the financial damage remains within reasonable limits, the damage to brand integrity will be much more severe. It’s critical for marketers to be vigilant, and it helps to understand how bots negatively impact the user experience.
Marketing automation will give smaller teams superpowers. Today, what determines success is the sheer size of a team and how much money a company can throw at acquiring and retaining users. But the advance of marketing automation throughout 2020 will change this dynamic — forever. Automation will become the “great equalizer,” enabling marketers to iterate and implement a vast greater number of campaigns than before. The ability to track results at every stage of the journey will also allow them to adapt campaigns on the fly, encouraging customer connection and driving conversions.
What is your understanding of the Indian market? How important is this market for Adjust?
As the world’s third-largest economy, India represents a potential growth market unlike any other. The country’s mobile market is already well-established, with home-grown success stories including PlaySimple, BankBazaar, FreshToHome and Pocket Aces inspiring the next wave of start-ups.
But this is just the beginning, and the region is still developing fast. Mobile penetration rates show there is still plenty of room for growth, with the number of smartphone users in India expected to double to 859 million by 2022 from 468 million users in 2017, according to a joint study from ASSOCHAM and PwC.
Adjust data shows that Gaming, Utilities and E-commerce apps are the fastest-growing app verticals – facilitated by rising salaries and an increase in purchasing power. With Asia Pacific being a leading contributor to global ad spend, we will continue to build on our success in India by growing our local teams across functions to meet demand, and focusing on go-to-market strategies in the region.
What are your plans for 2020?
Continuing to grow our market share in India is our priority. We also have some exciting product releases in the pipeline, which will help make marketing simpler, smarter and more secure for the brands we work with all around the world. The funding we raised in 2019 – one of Europe’s biggest rounds last year – will be used to invest in our product suite and diversify our offering. While we’ve been profitable for several years now, having this access to capital also means we can move fast when it comes to further acquisitions.
Anything else that you want to add?
At Adjust we’re really excited about the potential that automation has to revolutionize the marketing industry, especially when it comes to increasing the scale of mobile marketing activities. Today’s marketers handle many channels simultaneously, and the work involved is very manual – from setting up campaigns one by one on multiple network dashboards, manipulating large audience lists in Excel, or merging and acting on disparate sources of data.
With automation, marketers will be able to implement and execute a whole range of campaigns and initiatives more easily and seamlessly than ever before. And by increasing the number of campaigns one person can manage, it allows smaller brands to compete with large companies with big marketing departments. Reducing repetitive workflows also let teams focus on what really matters to them: creating the right strategies, and developing compelling content.
An example of an Adjust client who is using Automation to improve performance, while freeing up time to focus on creative optimization, is Coda – a big hyper casual game developer from London. Their Chief Operating Officer Andrew French has described automation as being the “heart of our business” – a single source of truth for all of their data. It allows them to focus on making games and bringing them to market. Adjust just did a case study on them and I encourage your readers to check it out!
Additionally, we’re proud to support the industry as a whole by bringing more education into the mobile ecosystem. We do that through educational events all around the globe, hosting workshops for clients and partners with industry experts, and regularly speaking at conferences and events. We also produce a range of educational resources around industry hot topics to share knowledge with marketers. Most recently, we launched our new online knowledge hub, Best of Mobile, which hosts five years’ worth of talks from our Adjust-hosted conference Mobile Spree.
