There was a time in which online businesses had their core business on a website, and with it money spent advertising the company’s said service. In 2015, the most innovative digital businesses are no longer focused on offering a “browser-based” service, rather a digital one in their own respective app on iOS, android, and others.
With businesses finding themselves in new uncharted territory, comes an even greater innovation from analytics and big data companies with the most recent innovation being predictive analytics. That is exactly where Rewardpod steps in and takes over.
Rewardpod was founded in 2013 and in 2014 succeeded in raising $1 million. The reason for the quick success in the funding is two-fold: the first being an innovative product that has proven to work and the second being the fact that the founding members are very experienced in what they do.
Co-founder Ze’ev Rozov co-founded and led Iconicfuture, was managing director of Conduit Europe, VP Marketing at PicScout, and the founder of SEA Multimedia, while co-founder Ehud Zaguri, amongst his experience, founded CloudKafe, and led the engineering team at Conduit. With that kind of experience, there were investors coming to them. Among their investors you can find Israeli high-tech leaders; Dror Erez co-founder of Conduit, Giora Kaplan co-founder of Wix and Tal Bar-Noach an active angel investor. Of course having their offices at WeWork only offers yet another stamp of credibility.
What is Rewardpod?
Rewardpod offers predictive analytics as-a-service to freemium app developers with what is called a predictive user value which helps digital businesses understand and predict both the quality and the life time value of users – based on just their first day of activity. But how is this possible if the user just signed up? Every app requires that users submit certain information in order to use the application’s services. Rewardpod is then given access to that data anonymously (clearly only if that app has stated that data will be given to 3rd party in their TOU), however Rewardpod themselves, do not use any data that can be used to recognize a user as it is not inline with their privacy policy and is also meaningless for creating predictive analytics. The company signs an agreement with every business that states that only information that has been granted access to 3rd parties will be accepted by them, and specifically tell the businesses that they don’t want email addresses, names, phone numbers, etc.
To simplify it all, instead of an app take for example a regular store in the shopping mall. The said store gets a thousand visitors every day, yet only 2-3% end up making a purchase. That store’s employees however, used their time and energy to try to convert as many visitors as possible into buyers – that’s not very efficient. Rewardpod divides the different visitors to your app into categories based on the likelihood of them spending money or upgrading so they can better focus their in-app monetization campaigns on those users with the most potential to upgrade
The majority of the apps that are currently available on the various app stores are free, with a large portion offering in-app purchases or work based on a freemium subscription. By using Rewardpod, the advertising team would be able to spend less time testing different in-app offers and upgrades, and be more efficient in offering the right in-app offer to the right user or in other words Dynamic Pricing.
Working in Digital Commerce and E-Commmerce?
In our conversation with co-founder and CTO Ehud Zaguri, we asked if RewardPod has plans or had planned at the launch to enter into the e-commerce realm.
At first, we considered e-commerce as well as digital commerce. However, we realized that the issues that app developers were facing in acquiring the right users and creating a stronger revenue stream was much deeper than the same issue for ecommerce sellers. Take for example gaming apps. The companies behind these apps work extremely hard to keep a positive cash flow. More than not, some companies stop spending advertising money to acquire new users, because the quality of the users they are getting from the campaigns is very low (no profitability). The interest of the ad-agencies that are hired by these companies is for a user to click on the advert and install the app at that moment the advertising company gets paid. At that moment, they are no longer part of the picture, therefore are not responsible for the quality of the user in terms of engagement and revenues.
Up until now app developers only knew how valuable a certain users acquisition campaign was after 10 days, but that’s all about to change (at least we all hope so) with Campaign Quality Scoring or in short CQS. Rewarpod CQS leverages predictive analytics technology to help optimize existing campaigns by factoring in user quality, bringing a significant improvement in return on acquisition budgets. It allows user acquisition managers to better allocate their budget and optimize bids per traffic source. The CQS predictive model runs daily and provides a predictive future value for each running campaign. All campaigns are scored against each other, ranking them by their likelihood of delivering paying customers. Since CQS’s predictions are forward-looking it can alert when a good campaign has reached its peak and is about to decline. It can also quickly score new campaigns from new sources that were not tried before.
Coming Soon
During the 3rd quarter of the coming year Rewardpod plans to release a dashboard for their clients to see everything that is going on. The app will feature a results dashboard that will offer insights into the results and predictions that the company has found for that respected client for the apps users and the company’s campaigns. In addition, businesses will be able to see their own historical trends so that they can get a better idea as to what works constantly, and in addition they’ll be able to be alerted immediately once a “good” campaign becomes average or poor.
Thus far, they’ve been able to help certain companies increase their revenue stream by up to 40%. If you like that number, and see a future in what they are doing, then there’s good news for you. The Israeli startup is hiring in both Israel – development engineer and data developers – and in London – intelligent sales people to join the already growing team.
