Mobile monetization gets harder and harder every year (heck, I’d bet this gets more difficult by the week in this ultra-competitive market). Companies have long been trying to solve this problem for studios and publishers, and the latest one to offer tools to help here is Wappier.
Wappier is a platform that uses AI models to predict consumer and user behavior, and it just raised $4 million in a seed round. Counterview Capital led this round, along with some funds from private and institutional investors. This capital injection will help Wappier plug away at its AI-powered revenue management and data visualization platform. The company says more than 80 apps and games use Wappier, such as NBA General Manager, Wizzo, and Fananees 2. It plans to expand into new markets with this funding as well.
I asked founder Alex Moukas how Wappier applies for mobile games and other apps.
“The mobile apps industry in general is in dire need of an intelligent automation platform that helps them maximize player revenue and loyalty, ” he said over email. “Mobile game publishers tend to spend a lot of money on UA campaigns, but the average Day 2 churn rate is 40%, which means advertising dollars are going to waste. Most publishers are really smart about things like LiveOps and IAP promotions, but small teams of marketers or monetization managers are often tasked with running programs for millions of users all at once, and there aren’t really any AI-based automation solutions to help them solve the problem. That’s where Wappier comes in.”
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Wappier uses its platform to predict how users will behave in apps, and it “automatically delivers” offers and loyalty programs that fit how that person uses the app or game. And marketing teams can use what they see in visualization models that make it easier to digest complex sets of data. The company says this platform “goes beyond typical marketing automation by understanding, modeling, predicting, and influencing consumer behavior by closing the loop and delivering the next best action based on each individual’s propensity to react.”
Of course, I wanted to ask just how these AI and data visualization do help retain users, be they players of a game or shoppers in a commerce app.
“AI is used to model, predict, and influence consumer behavior in a way that makes consumers engage more and spend more. Our platform uses descriptive analytics to deeply analyze what happened and why it happened, predictive analytics to forecast what will happen next, and prescriptive analytics to target each individual consumer with the optimal next best action in real time,” Moukas said. “This next best action can be a limited sale, an optimal marketing campaign, personalized ad copy, or anything else that makes sense to the consumer and will trigger their behavior by incentivizing them to take an action and move further down the consumer funnel.”
So instead of spending effort and money finding users, you can use Wappier to keep those you have, reducing app churn. Wappier says its platform analyzers over 2 billion data facts per day from over 15 million users. From this, the company claims that customers have experienced an average increase of 25% in retention rates and and 30% in per-user revenue.
I was also curious about its competitors.
“There are a few companies out there, each one of which is coming at the market a little differently. But no one has managed to tie all the pieces of retention, engagement, and monetization together the way we have,” Mouskas said. “Having run revenue management and loyalty programs for some of the biggest telecom companies in the world, we saw an opportunity for those programs to have a tremendous impact on the mobile apps industry. It’s a bit ironic that there are so many AI-based marketing, push notification, and UA solutions available for mobile apps, but so few AI-based revenue and loyalty solutions. We’re trying to fix that.”
Wappier has 50 employees in New York City and Athens and Patras, Greece.
