Mobile marketing analytics firm Singular is merging with mobile app attribution and audience management firm Apsalar today so the two companies can offer a combined product line for businesses.
The combined enterprise will be known as Singular and will offer an important third-party source of mobile user data on the individual level, said Gadi Eliashiv, CEO of San Francisco-based Singular, in an interview with GamesBeat. The goal is to destroy silos of data and give marketers access to new insights into their customers on a more granular level, he said.
“Mobile attribution is one piece of the equation,” he said. “We are looking at marketing activities from an end-to-end standpoint. The reality is a few companies cannot catch all of the marketing activity of every company in the system.”
Singular is expanding beyond mobile apps to the web, offline channels, and other devices. The combined company will have 110 employees.
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“We never could have imagined the crazy ride we’ve been having,” Eliashiv said. “When we talk to Facebook, Google, and others, they are really on board with our approach to the market. Third-party measurement companies are always going to exist, as there is always someone independent that you need to measure.”
Singular has deep-level reporting across marketing platforms — ad networks and life-cycle management companies and agencies — that report various kinds of data, said Singular chief operating officer Susan Kuo, in an interview.
“We’ve got an end-to-end marketing analytics platform,” Kuo said. “We think it will be a watershed for changes in the marketing ecosystem.”
Historically, marketers were forced to collect and connect siloed, non-standardized data from an ever-growing number of marketing solutions and channels. This has resulted in inaccurate data, scaling challenges, and, above all, has prevented marketers from exposing and leveraging the return-on-investment of their marketing activities.
Singular makes it easier to see if mobile marketers are making money off their advertising spend. It breaks down the data from any marketing source, including ad networks, marketing clouds, data warehouses, social channels, and even other marketing analytics systems.
Above: Apsalar is merging with Singular.
The new combined platform of the two companies enables marketers to expose the ROI of each user touch point — be it on an ad, an email, a push notification, or in-app and web events.
“Mobile attribution is a critical piece of today’s marketing stack, yet up until now it has been treated as a standalone solution, designed primarily to report on mobile app installs,” Eliashiv said. “This has given rise to broken attribution models that rely on data captured only through tracking tags and neglect to address the complete marriage of marketing campaigns with user events.”
He added, “This approach has blinded marketers by preventing them from seeing what happens outside of these tags. For example, let’s say you send an SMS and the user doesn’t click on it, or you create a campaign that targets a specific audience and they do not engage with the campaign. Today’s attribution technology will not pick up these data points.”
“Our new platform lets marketers move past that paradigm by enabling them to capture every necessary piece of data from every touchpoint – no matter its origin or format,” Eliashiv said. “This is crucial for performing accurate ROI analysis and it finally opens up the door to the holy grail of multi-touch attribution and cross-device analysis, which can only be truly achieved by taking all marketing data sets into account.”
“We are excited to enter the next phase of Apsalar’s growth as part of this merger,” said Apsalar CEO and cofounder Michael Oiknine, in a statement. “The unification of our advanced attribution and audience management capabilities with Singular’s already robust analytics platform is something that is truly needed by the industry. We are thrilled to build on our shared vision and provide marketers with a game-changing platform that will further simplify and improve their lives.”
Oiknine will join as chief revenue and strategy officer. Customers of the combined businesses include Lyft, Yelp, Walmart, Zynga, N3twork, Match Group, and LinkedIn.
Ran Makavy, vice president of growth at Lyft, said in a statement, “Singular’s new unified platform enables our team to bring more of our marketing data under one roof. Their unique ability to connect data to expose ROI seamlessly across mobile and desktop channels — at the most granular level — is essential in helping us hit our marketing goals during this stage of hyper growth at Lyft.”
