COLOGNE – As mobile marketing KPI’s have evolved over the last several years, advertisers are getting “way more transparency than they ever had,” says Adjust CEO & Co-Founder Christian Henschel.
Adjust’s SDK resides within its customers’ apps and “we transfer the data to our platform and then help our customers to understand what kind of campaigns they are running, what kind of value they can get out of it,” Henschel says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.
The data Henschel refers to is some 500 billion data points that it manages each month. “We basically created a fluid data system that hasn’t been there before.”
That data informs comparisons of campaigns and creative elements across various channels. “Plus we have all the data coming afterwards such as events, so we’re basically making sure that our customers have a complete transparency about the customer journey from acquisition down to churn,” Henschel says.
Adjust first partnered with retargeting provider Criteo about four years ago and has been expanding that partnership around the globe, according to Henschel.
“For Criteo specifically, mobile has become a significant part of their business and I think with our technology we’re helping them a lot to get more traction there and also to run better results for their customers.”
In terms of the evolution of digital advertising, Henschel notes the huge difference between the desktop world and mobile considering cookies versus device ID’s. “But what we see as the biggest change over the last couple of years that people are really focusing on other KPI’s than they did before.”
Five years ago, the whole industry “was basically focusing on CPC, getting the most effective CPC, the cheapest” before shifting to CPI and now to return on ad spend.
“This is when the retargeting companies came into the space, including Criteo, and now it’s really about incrementality,” Henschel says.
Henschel is a longtime attendee of DMEXCO, having represented “many companies over many years.” Given his German heritage, he’s pleased at the way DMEXCO has grown, citing a panel this year about German adtech companies that had managed to achieve global scale.
“Compared to the early days, we also have now German, relevant international companies and somehow that’s also reflected in the panels, in all the companies out there exhibiting and that’s something I’m actually really proud of.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
