A formal introduction to the world’s most sophisticated mobile advertising technology provider.
If you’re short on time, here is a quick outline of the article, so you can skip to parts you find useful:
- Introduction: Advertising Technology & Mobile Businesses
- Moloco: What do we Offer?
- User Acquisition
- Re-Engagement
- Ad Cloud
- Double Check
- Summary & Next Steps
Introduction: AdTech & Mobile Businesses
Mobile apps have fundamentally transformed the way that we live.
Need to eat something but don’t want to get off your couch? No worries – at your fingertips lie 100+ restaurants that will deliver to you in 30min. Need to get home but don’t want to drive or take the bus? Uber or Lyft will happily take you home (and take your money). Want to invest in the stock market but don’t want to hire a broker? Robinhood to the rescue.
Yes, it may seem as if everyone and their mother is currently creating some sort of app, and well, you wouldn’t be wrong. In a recent report from Statista, there are over 6 million apps available on leading App Stores (this is a crazy figure given that it’s only been about 10 years since Google and Apple launched their App Stores).
But if you really think about it, creating a mobile app or business has never been easier than before, and quite frankly, offers tremendous opportunity for wealth creation and adding tangible value to the world.
A recent report reveals that 69% of digital media time is spent on mobile. Combine this with the fact that consumers spend 92% of their time on smartphones in apps, and you can start to understand the recent explosion in mobile apps.
It’s therefore no surprise that mobile advertising spend has soared. Indeed, it is estimated that nearly $40 billion was spent in 2018, with $64 billion expected by 2020. Yep, those are massive numbers.
Mobile Advertising spans a lot of different types: one could embed video ads into their app, run Search ads in the Apple Store, run re-engagement ads based on users who have already installed their app, and many, many more different things.
For example, here’s an example of a Search Ad in the Apple Store:
Each ad can also come in a variety of different creative formats: one could embed an image, produce a video, record a playable, or simply write a block of text. One of the challenges App Creators face is recognizing when to use each creative format, but more about this later.
Across all mobile advertising, however, one must keep in mind that personalization is key. A 50 year old baseball fan should not be seeing the same ad as a 16 year indie enthusiast – though both individuals may eventually download the same app, it is very unlikely that the same exact ad will produce the desired results.
Therefore, services that have the ability to segment audiences, optimize creative assets based on audience and platform, as well as use the latest technology to provide specific audience targeting will always have an edge in the market (and will deliver the best results for App Businesses).
And that’s where Moloco comes into play.
Moloco: AdTech Company of the Future
Moloco is an advertising technology company that enables mobile businesses to thrive. Fundamentally, Moloco allows mobile businesses to reach the right audiences, get more out of their existing audiences, develop new revenue streams, and combat ad fraud.
In an industry that is often filled with false promises, fraudulent ads, and a lack of cross-functionality across different platforms, Moloco is able to provide phenomenal scale and quality to its advertisers.
Moloco offers a wide variety of solutions to its advertisers, which can be condensed into four main categories. I will explain each category one-by-one in a manner that is hopefully logical and easy to follow.
User Acquisition
A mobile business needs users to be able to grow. But creating ads that convert and reach the right audiences is not only a challenge from a creative perspective, but it is also hugely time-consuming.
Moloco offers programmatic advertising services that enable mobile business advertisers to automatically target consumers based on certain metrics that are obtained through algorithms. This means that instead of manually having to go through hundreds of different publishers and determine where and how to advertise, Moloco’s technology automates this process, and in fact creates a better outcome since everything is data-driven. Specifically, Moloco makes use of real-time-bidding (RTB), which is one way to determine if the advertiser wants to purchase advertising space on a publisher’s website.
An example of programmatic advertising is illustrated below:
Now, you may be wondering the following: the concept of programmatic advertising and RTB is not that new – there are various competitors in this space – what differentiates Moloco from the others?
Well, Moloco has developed a proprietary Machine Learning prediction engine that optimizes campaign performance to drive high quality users at scale. This is exceptionally unique: Moloco’s engineering team is comprised of A-Players from Facebook, Amazon, and Google, and has ensured that the technology being developed is powerful, accurate, and scalable.
Moloco also offers Lookalike Audience Targeting. Very simply put, this allows advertisers to focus in on their most valuable current users (perhaps users that have the most in-app purchases or highest engagement rate), and then find audiences that are very similar to those users and advertise to them. Again, Moloco’s state-of-the art technology facilitates this process and drives tremendous growth for mobile businesses. Here’s a graphic that exemplifies this point:
Finally, it is also important to mention that Moloco’s industry leading dynamic engine converts brand assets into exceptional display art for advertising. By using data to find the optimal blend of image, native, video, and playable formats, Moloco is able to scale advertising without losing any creativity or personalized touch.
Let’s now move onto Moloco’s second main offering – Re-Engagement.
Re-Engagement
It is a well-known fact in the persuasion world (Robert Cialdini fans, I’m looking at you) that most customers do not buy on the first go – a seller needs to build comfort, offer genuine value, and keep persisting until the prospect is no longer just a cold prospect, but now an engaged member of one’s brand.
The same exact logic applies to mobile advertisers, and this is why Moloco’s Re-Engagement solution is so powerful.
Specifically, Re-Engagement advertising enables advertisers to unlock higher customer LTV (lifetime value). Rather than just saying goodbye forever to a user who doesn’t purchase anything on the first or second go, by re-engaging him with content that is relevant to his past actions, advertisers are able to generate much more revenue out of their audience.
Here is a graphic example that illustrates this thesis below:
It’s also worth noting that Moloco’s technology supports dynamic segmentation, so advertisers don’t need to send updated user lists at every single instance.
Let’s now move onto Moloco’s third, and arguably most exciting, offering – the Ad Cloud.
Ad Cloud
Facebook makes approximately 90% of its revenue from its advertising platform (source). People will pay vast amounts of money to be able to target key users and segment based on a wide variety of metrics.
Now, with Moloco’s Ad Cloud, your mobile business can do the same.
Moloco provides mobile businesses a self-serve ad platform along with a suite of products all as a cloud service. By leveraging Moloco’s machine learning technology, advertisers are able to segment your users at an exceptionally accurate level, all whilst you’re able to monetize your audience and unlock a new revenue stream.
Such a services requires an ability to handle extensive amounts of data, and Moloco’s cloud infrastructure is robust and well-equipped to handle large volume. For instance, see what Google Cloud Platform wrote about them here.
Finally, Moloco’s platform also allows for audience extension: this basically means that your advertisers can extend their reach onto third-party apps, and thereby makes your advertising platform even more enticing from their perspective.
Double Check
Finally, let’s delve into one of the most important topics in all of advertising technology today: the prevalence of ad fraud.
Despite industry initiatives to address it, ad fraud is still a massive issue. Juniper Research estimated that advertisers lost around $19 billion in total in 2018 on ad fraud, and that this number is only going to rise in the upcoming year. Due to this mounting pressure, Google has in fact taken vast initiative towards what it calls “bad” ads: ads that violate its policies. The chart below shows this increased initiative nicely:
At Moloco, it is our aim to ensure that the advertisers that we work with are well protected against any type of such fraud, and that your ad spend is never wasted. Using our technology, we have built a cutting edge fraud solution (coined “DoubleCheck”) that tackles both ad fraud and install quality.
After running our analysis, we formulate a DoubleCheck score that is composed of both an install score and a retention score for your mobile business. The graphic below illustrates it nicely:
The insights that our fraud solution deliver can be utilized to save you money, time, and to direct your efforts on the most productive marketing channels. Our solution so far has helped save some advertisers up to 80% of their marketing budget, and by re-assigning those savings towards more productive channels, real user growth is expected to grow by 25%.
We have gone into more detail about Ad Fraud and what you can do about in our 3 part series on Medium, which is linked below:
Now that we’ve explored the most important aspects of Moloco’s solutions, let’s take a step back and really think about why you should work with us.
Summary & Next Steps
Working with a trusted partner in the advertising technology space like Moloco should be a real no-brainer for your mobile business. Just to recap, here are three key reasons why we can provide exceptional value:
We have the best engineering team in the world. Seriously. We have backgrounds from the best tech companies in the Valley (Facebook, Amazon, Google etc) and Moloco’s brilliance is definitely rooted in its people. Our proprietary machine learning technology enables us to drive high-quality users at scale. We can segment your audience based on your most valuable users, and then our technology will use hundreds of signals to find lookalike audiences based on the information just collected. By working with Moloco, you never have to worry about coordinating your brand assets towards creative formats because our creative engine does that automatically. We truly care about the mobile businesses that we work with, and will go to great lengths to ensure that your experience working with us is nothing short of exceptional.
We offer a full suite of solutions. Whilst most players in this space may offer you ad fraud solutions or user acquisition tools, it is rare that they will offer you a mix of these tools (at scale). Our full-stack technology suite offers your mobile business whatever it needs to both grow fast and safely. If you work with us, you’ll never have to contract any other agencies to do any part of the advertising process again – we’ll handle everything and drive results that will grow your business exceptionally fast.
Ad Cloud Service. This is definitely our X factor, and if your mobile business already has a dynamic & large user base, you should be thrilled! By working with us, you unlock one of the most profitable and scalable revenue streams that mobile businesses have access to. Our entire suite of products is offered as a cloud service – our infrastructure already handles massive amounts of data in real-time with precision and efficiency. We’ll be able to handle yours, and ensure that your advertisers have the scale and performance that they need to drive reliable insights.
If you liked what you just read and have any questions, or simply would like to get to know us better, feel free to reach out here. We look forward to hearing from you!