In one sentence, what does adeven do?

Adeven provides independent mobile ad verification and cutting edge app download tracking solutions with extensive analytics, bringing transparency and accountability to the mobile advertising ecosystem.

What problems does adeven solve?

There are three current key issues in the mobile advertising space: transparency, accurate ad analytics and verification.

Up to this point anyone using mobile advertising has only really received clicks and impressions. What constitutes a click and impression varies across the industry with many counting false clicks or un-rendered impressions.

There is also an inherent conflict of interest when using a pay per click model if the people telling you how many clicks or impressions you get are the same people you are paying for the advertising space.

We solve this conflict of interest by providing independent third party verification. We are neutral – we don’t sell media. With third party verification, advertisers are able to base their advertising decisions on fact rather than faith and are they in control of their own data.

Adeven also delivers deeper insights through meaningful statistics.

The key question that anyone investing in mobile marketing wants answered is “does the money you are spending provide a return on investment, not only in terms of users but also in terms of revenue?”

This is what adeven’s adjust.io analyzer does. It attributes for example sources to installs. Other companies already do this, however we don’t stop there.

We offer additional valuable, data rich KPIs. These are comprehensive post-install KPIs that help qualify the users that are acquired through mobile marketing, giving a deeper understanding what users are worth and where they come from.

Our adjust.io analyzer product shows how the users from different sources compare over time and how much they are worth after seven days, a month and over their lifetime. Users from marketing campaigns can also easily be compared with the behaviour of organic users and custom events can be tracked.

Mobile advertising is a big number game – we are talking about thousands and millions spent on advertising each month. And there is a huge potential to optimise this.

On the other hand our free online tool, apptrace also provides transparency to the iOS app ecosystem by giving users complete access to data including:

  • Global and country rankings for device and price.
  • Graphs and charts showing app and publisher performance.
  • Sentiment analysis that crunches over 27m app store reviews to give an idea of how addictive an app is or how high the crash complaints are.

Outside of our product offerings, we are actively involved in industry discussions to help the industry move forward in developing guidelines, standards and an appreciation of valid statistics that are essential for efficient mobile campaign management.

When and why did you launch it?

The mobile advertising industry was in a bit of a mess a year ago (given its young age) and we wanted to help move the industry forward. Yes, there are companies who do analytics, but no one who provides a holistic approach to the ecosystem from both an advertising and developer perspective. The whole scene was a little bit blurry and dark, and we turned the lights on.

We saw an opportunity to provide technically advanced ad analytics and verification products and services for the mobile industry that were simply missing before.

We founded adeven in April 2012 in Berlin and within the first six months we had secured investor support, launched our free online apptrace tool, successfully launched our analyzer product, and opened our London office.

Who is your target audience?

We work with media agencies, direct clients and ad networks.

Our adjust.io analyzer product is aimed at large advertising agencies or specialist mobile advertisers; big brand clients, and serious developers and publishers who want meaningful KPIs that show how their advertising campaigns are performing so that they can optimize their campaigns and get the biggest bang for their buck.

When we are talking about 20  to 100K per campaign budget, the benefits of doing it smart are obvious.

Our adjust.io verifier is targeted at advertising agencies who want to know what they are getting the advertising they paid for. We provide third party verification for KPIs such as clicks and impressions, eliminating accidental clicks and click fraud. We work with all major ad networks to ensure our technology is supported by them.

Apptrace.com (which is free) is our way of giving back to the app community. It is a great tool that publishers, developers, journalists and also advertisers use to get insights into the app ecosystem.

What are your immediate goals?

We want to encourage mobile advertising market growth. For this to happen, we know that advertisers need the right tools and services to manage successful campaigns. We are doing everything we can to support them.

Our adjust.io verifier product has successfully and robustly been tested extensively by both advertisers and networks. We are just about to officially launch it onto the market in the coming weeks (stay tuned!)

Aside from this, our list of new features for apptrace is huge and we are only limited by the amount of work that can reasonably be achieved in one day. One of the exciting features slated for the next couple of months the download perdition tool. Guess our price – free.

We have a third adjust.io product in the pipeline and plans for international expansion this year.

What were the biggest challenges involved in building adeven?

Great people work for adeven and we are all ambitious. Our biggest challenge is to find talented and passionate people. We are also operating at the forefront of new technology and the product knowledge that our team needs is not every day stuff. We invest a lot of time in training our team so they can pass their expert knowledge onto our clients.

From an industry perspective, our challenge is what we have set out to address. This is the lack of transparency and standardisation in the industry. Read our blog article about in-app advertising guidelines needed for mobile ad market growth

How will the company make money?

Our analyzer and verifier products are priced on a performance basis. People with a marketing budget, who want to optimise their campaign are interested in our paid products. So a tiny bit extra on analytics and verification to save a lot of money is never a problem in their eyes.

Also, apptrace is free and will always be free.

Who is in your team?

Since April last year, we have rapidly expanded our team from our original three founders, Christian Henschel, Paul H. Müller and Manuel Kniep to cover a customer support team, software developers, data scientists, sales and marketing, and office support.

Christian is the CEO of adeven and is involved in all aspects of business oversight and development (apart from the technical side). His specialised background in mobile advertising is a great compliment to Paul and Manuel’s management and technical background in app development and building of highly scalable systems.

Paul is the CTO and is responsible for product development and also for building and scaling the adeven’s technologies. As the Senior Developer, Manuel works on the development platform, maintains the database and finely tunes performance and analytics. He also has a helicopter license.

Giuseppe Bellanca is adeven’s Managing Director, EMEA. Heading up our London office, he is responsible for overseeing the development of adeven in the European marketplace, while Hendrik Volp looks after global partnerships from the Berlin office.

Where would you like to be in one, three and five year’s times

Our goal is to be the market leader in ad analytics, verification and optimisation worldwide. In one year we will have launched our fourth product and will be the market leader in the Europe. In three to five years we would like to be recognized as the standard platform in terms of mobile advertising.

Other than adeven’s apptrace, what are your favourite websites / apps / tools?

We think our apptrace website is pretty cool and a great tool for developers (like some of us here at adeven). Aside from this site we like….

We love GitHub, IFTTT.com, thefancy.com – and also use Podio and Google apps for business.