Happy Holidays! Here’s to a Successful 2013!

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Happy holidays from Kontagent CEO Jeff Tseng!

2012 has been a banner year
As we gear up for what promises to be an even more exciting 2013, I wanted to reflect on some of our major milestones and reaffirm our commitment to providing you the key analytics and insights needed to drive your success.

From social to mobile to multiscreen
We got our start in the social gaming space five years ago. We’ve worked with thousands of game studios who developed apps for social platforms such as Facebook and Tencent. These developers are light years ahead when it comes to using data to test and improve their app experiences to increase acquisitions, engagement, retention, monetization and brand loyalty among their users.

In working with them, we’ve been able to write the playbook on app development–and the best practices that work for mobile.

Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned: Continue Reading…

Introducing the kSuite iOS App for Executives on the Go

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Kontagent launches iOS app to bring the kSuite dashboard to your iPhone and iPad.

We live in a world of seconds. Gone are the staid empires of yesteryear. Today, corporations can fall as fast as they rise. It could be an undiscovered bug crashing your app or an untapped revenue stream discovered too late.

All it takes are a few missteps and suddenly you’re belly-up. That’s why successful managers and executives need constant access to their company’s metrics. At Kontagent, we understand this and it’s why we’re proud to announce our new iPhone and iPad apps. You can download them today for free in the Apple App Store. 

Now, whether you’re waiting for a flight in Bangladesh or in line for your morning brew, as a Kontagent customer, you can access your kSuite analytics dashboard anywhere from your iOS device. We’re among the first mobile customer intelligence solution providers to make business analytics available on-the-go. As the industry leader, our goal is simple: create the tools and services our clients need to grow their companies faster.

So what can our new apps do?

Continue Reading…

3 Tips for Building a Killer App for the Holidays

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To some developers, the notion of designing or redesigning an app for the holiday season is a project exclusively reserved for gaming companies. After all, why would map, banking, or any utility app user care about having Santa Claus plastered across their splash screen? Well, they actually do–much more than you may think.

Holiday apps are important. Everyone knows that December means big bucks for the retail industry, and mobile app sales are no exception. On average, developers can expect to see a huge bump in app purchases. For instance, last year, iPhone app revenue rose 50 percent from November to January. Even more surprising is that growth remained high well past the holiday season into February.

All of this means that the holidays are definitely not the time for developers to be resting on their laurels. So what can you do to capitalize on this consumer spending frenzy? The answer is simpler than it seems.

Continue Reading…

kScope Profile: How Data Science is Incorporated into the Business

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Martin Colaco is a senior manager on Kontagent’s data science team.

One of Kontagent’s differentiating factors is that we have a team of data scientists who touch every aspect of our business: from developing products and influencing the roadmap to providing professional services to clients who rely on our domain expertise in mobile analytics. This is the first in a series of profiles we’ll be highlighting to give you an inside look at Kontagent–our people, process and platform.

Martin Colaco is a senior manager on Kontagent’s data science team. He received his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Stanford and UC Berkeley, respectively. Colaco talked to us about the role data science plays in an evolving multiscreen world, and how businesses can gain a competitive edge if they adopt these methodologies early.

What is your background?
Professionally, I’ve completed modeling work on regression and in-game data for the Denver Nuggets of the NBA. I’ve also been an analyst in the ecommerce space, working on ranking algorithms for product reviews. We modeled the ROI and value of products for more than 50+ customers to optimize their revenues.

What I’ve learned from these experiences is that businesses need to know what questions to ask in order to meet their objectives, and that ferreting through the growing amounts of data to find those answers is a major challenge.

What skills do you think a data scientist should have?
Drew Conway wrote a great blog post, The Data Science Venn Diagram. In it he lists the components that make up data science: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise. Continue Reading…

Kontagent Partner Edition Now Available to Tapjoy Community

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Tapjoy launches Kontagent Partner Edition to deliver critical user data to developers and advertisers.

We’re proud to announce that, starting today, publishers and advertisers who partner with Tapjoy will have access to Kontagent Partner Edition!*

With this partnership, Tapjoy and Kontagent will help developers of all sizes use important data to increase engagement and monetization. Whether you’re a publisher or an advertiser, you’ll gain detailed visibility into first-session user interactions, and be able to create more targeted mobile marketing campaigns.

This is really exciting for us here at Kontagent because we know the power of data. Social and mobile game developers have been using data for years to find the most engaged, profitable players–and then game devs use data to continually optimize the user experience and keep these high-value players coming back for more.

“Being agile in this industry means being completely in sync with how our players are using our game,” said Amer Tadayon, Tap Saloon CEO. “As a result of using Kontagent, we’ve made some huge data-driven changes that enable us to provide a better game experience based on historical observed behaviors.”

Savvy mobile businesses are taking a page from the game developer’s book. We’ve seen non-gaming mobile businesses use our solution, and kill it. Here’s what SmugMug‘s Head of iOS Analytics Sam Nichols has said about us:

Kontagent makes our previous analytics solution look like banging rocks together.

That’s confirmation that we’re onto something big–and we want to share it with you. Continue Reading…

Kontagent, Facebook Enable Mobile Marketers to Run More Effective Campaigns

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iOS and Android app marketers now have more visibility into the performance of advertising efforts with Facebook’s new mobile app install ads.

If you’re a mobile marketer or developer, you may recall the announcement late last month that Facebook had ended the beta test of its new mobile app install ad units and was officially opening them up to all developers. This was a very big deal.

With the increasing importance of mobile as both a marketing channel and a product platform, it makes sense that mobile marketers and developers were excited about the opportunity to reach Facebook’s massive user base via smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

Kontagent helping to solve the mobile measurement challenge
Mobile marketers know how difficult it can be to get a real-world sense of the effectiveness of their ad spend. But, if they’re running campaigns on Facebook Mobile, it just got a lot easier.

With today’s announcement that Kontagent will be a Facebook certified Mobile Measurement Partner, they’ll have more clarity around their marketing metrics. In a practical sense, what this means is that Kontagent customers who purchase the new mobile app install ad unit on Facebook will, through our Mobile Marketing Analytics, be able to gain deeper insights into levels of user: Continue Reading…

5 Tips to Improving Your Mobile Strategy

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Priceline’s Booking.com launched a mobile app to boost its revenue after the company saw more than $1 million in mobile transactions last year.

Recently I was in Europe, traveling from France to Italy. I used my mobile phone several times for last-minute bookings through apps such as Kayak, Expedia and Orbitz. I entered my credit card information once, and searched and compared flights and hotels. One-click shopping. The boarding passes were emailed directly to me, and I presented them via my mobile phone at the airport.

Turns out, this new way to travel is very common. According to a survey conducted by hotel chain Sheraton, today’s business traveler carries an average of 3-4 mobile devices. Sixty percent of these business travelers say they rely on their mobile devices to make traveling easier and more convenient. In fact, HotelClub says mobile users are five times more likely to book a same-day check-in than they are on desktop. Expedia expects half of its bookings will be via mobile in the next two years.

Consumers are turning to their mobile devices for entertainment, shopping, travel, banking and everything else. This is an amazing opportunity to grow your business because you can have 24/7 access to your customers. So, no matter what industry you’re in, incorporating mobile into your overall business strategy is imperative.

But, simply building a mobile app is not the same as having a mobile strategy.

It takes a mobile experience to drive brand loyalty, customer engagement and conversion. Here are some things to consider:
Continue Reading…

Analytics: 2012 is for Mobile What 1997 was for the Web

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“The evolution of marketing continues as we enter the multiscreen world. Think of it this way: 2012 is for mobile what 1997 was for the Web. Take it a step further; Kontagent is to mobile what Webtrends was to the Web.”

As a data-driven marketer, Rand Schulman* gave us an overview of the evolution of analytics (see video). He has even gone so far as to say that the Web is dead. Here’s more on why Rand compares what we’re doing today in mobile to what online marketers did in the early days of the Web.

How does your experience qualify you to speak about the evolution of analytics?
I helped create an industry, inventing brand name online marketing and new media products from benchmark vendors: WebSideStory (acquired by Omniture/Adobe); Keylime Software, (acquired by Yahoo!); WebTrends, Unica (acquired by IBM); Eightfold Logic; InsideView. I am a founder and past board member of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA), and the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation (DMEF). In 2005, I was named one of the Top 100 B2B marketing executives by BtoB Magazine.

What are the biggest challenges mobile marketers and developers currently face?
Right now, mobile marketing is like measuring hits on Web. It’s a good first start, but it’s not the end game. In mobile, people are doing basic things, e.g., App Store optimization–trying to get your app in the top lists–by testing names, categories, etc. that might give you the best rankings. It’s really basic. Continue Reading…

Welcome to the Multiscreen World

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Courtesy of Google

We are a nation of multi-screeners. That’s according to a report conducted by Google, in conjunction with Ipsos and Sterling Brands. We consume digital content between a combination of smartphones, tablets, computers and TVs.

The context–where we are, what we want to accomplish in a given amount of time–determines which screen we choose. And, although the smartphone is the backbone of daily media consumption, there are two primary modes of usage: Continue Reading…

GigaOM Mobilize – Apponomics: What Makes an App a Hit

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Watch live streaming video from mobilize2012 at livestream.com

 
Kontagent President and Chief Science Officer Josh Williams was invited to participate in a GigaOM Mobilize panel discussion on the challenges of monetization in the mobile economy—click above to view. A summary of it is also available below.
 
iOS’s lead over Android in app monetization is shrinking
Conventional wisdom has held for a while that Apple’s iOS platform was by far the best way to monetize apps. Sure, Android’s platform was big but the users who tended to pay for apps were most likely using an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. That’s changing thanks to the greater diversity of app monetization strategies—in-app purchases, driving traffic through social channels, and advertising—a panel of app experts said during a session at GigaOM Mobilize conference this month.

Read the full story here.