Digital marketing firm Glispa is unveiling the fourth version of its Quality Optimization Engine to offer even more optimized ads for mobile and online app and game developers.
Jaeson Hildebrand, the vice president of client services at Berlin-based Glispa, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the new version of the engine will make ad buying more effective and reduce advertising costs for developers.
“The Quality Optimization Engine is the backbone of our products and services,” he said. “As a performance marketing company, we get paid on installs. But this tool is not just designed to bring users, but to bring users that are of value to our developers.”
When you think about it, making advertising spending more effective isn’t necessarily going to drive more revenue for an ad tech company like Glispa. But Hildebrand said that by giving up short-term revenue and improving the quality of users, Glispa will be a better long-term partner for developers.
“We want to make ad buying more effective and reduce advertising costs for development partners, which we call advertisers,” Hildebrand said. “Certain events like how users are engaging in apps, those get pinged into Glispa’s QOE. We can monitor how Glispa generated users, engage within these partner apps, so our traffic is meeting and exceeding expectations. If the game developer comes to us and we need a certain amount of first day completion and day three retention, then we buy traffic from sources that meet those results and we remove those sources that are not meeting the goal.”
In March, London-based Market Tech Holdings , which is trading on the London Stock Exchange at a value of $1.4 billion, bought a majority stake in Glispa for $77 million. Market Tech Holdings has a combination of real estate holdings and an e-commerce business operated through an online platform called Market.com. With the Glispa deal, the company is moving into high-performance digital marketing campaigns.
Glispa said recently that it gets more than 84 billion of its (mostly mobile) 400 billion monthly ad impressions from the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The number of BRIC ad impressions is up 90 percent from a year ago, and it illustrates the rapid growth of smartphones in the fast-growing sector, whose component countries still have a population of an estimated 2 billion people who don’t own smartphones.
The company plans and launches marketing campaigns on mobile devices and the Web, enabling app publishers to reach a more diverse set of users across the world through performance-based ads (those where the publisher gets paid if the user takes an action like installing an app).
“The methodology is we integrate with ad partners early on and mirror their key performance indicators [KPIs],” Hildebrand said. “We adopt same quality standards of media buying as their internal teams would do. We engage early from strategy and tech perspective on how they buy internally. We mirror that and improve on it.”
Glispa is also increasing the capacity of data that it can handle for its partners, Hildebrand said.
“Long-term, because we supply better quality, we can get bigger budgets month over month and that is why we are growing as a company,” said Glispa chief marketing officer Nicole Demeo in an interview.
Together with its parent firm Market Tech Holdings, Glispa targets mobile commerce, a market that analyst firm Digi-Capital expects to be the dominant business model, creating over $516 billion in sales and driving more than 70 percent of all mobile Internet revenue by 2017.
Glispa already reaches about a billion active mobile users and serves more than 400 billion ad impressions a month. According to eMarketer, the worldwide mobile ad market will grow to nearly $65 billion in 2015, up over 60 percent from 2014. That figure is expected to reach $158.55 billion by 2018, when mobile ads will account for 22.3 percent of all advertising spending worldwide.
Glispa’s brand advertisers include Alibaba, Amazon, Flipkart, Gilt Group, OLX, Baidu, Hasbro, Zynga, and Gumi.
Gary Lin founded Glispa in Berlin in 2008, and it has expanded to offices in San Francisco, Bangalore, Beijing, and Sao Paolo. It recently said it is adding six million new customers monthly, and it has 210 million monthly active users now. Roughly 90 percent of the business is mobile, while the rest is PC. About 30 percent of the impressions are for gaming publishers, but the rest are from categories such as mobile commerce, music services, productivity, and entertainment.
The company launched in Brazil in 2008 with clients such as OLX. It added Russia in 2009, with clients like Mail.Ru. It added India in 2011 and entered the Chinese market in 2012. In China, it has 1,631 publishers. Glispa says it is working with 18 of the top 30 publishers in China.
Glispa has 120 employees.
