TechBytes with Paul H. Müller, Co-Founder and CTO at Adjust

Could you tell us about your role and journey into Technology?

I’m the CTO and Co-founder of Adjust, the industry leader in Mobile Measurement, Fraud Prevention and Cybersecurity. We’re a global SaaS company helping other companies, from large brands to startups, make their Marketing simpler, smarter and more secure. I’m responsible for building and scaling our platform, and overseeing a great team of Developers, Engineers, Data Analysts and Fraud Specialists based in our 15 offices all over the world.

My role as a leader and entrepreneur in the mobile sector stems from having been an app developer myself many years back. At that time, mobile marketers had no idea where their users were coming from, how they discovered the app or how they were using it. My Co-Founders and I knew that we could solve the problem, so we started the company to begin working on a solution.

My vision has always been to build the best possible products  in order to provide high-quality analytics, measurement, campaign management, and fraud prevention to mobile marketers worldwide — even if it means pushing the envelope in the mobile economy. Ultimately, we want CMOs around the world to turn to us as the definitive growth engine for their apps.

What was the driving force behind your inaugural launch of Mobile Growth Map?

We launched our Mobile Growth Map to equip marketers across all verticals with insights on growth, retention, paid vs. organic, and other vital metrics. For too long, app marketers have been laser-focused on user acquisition. We believe that effective app Marketing goes beyond UA to include the bigger-picture user lifecycle. Segmentation and re targeting should go hand in hand. So, target the right users, at just the right time in their journey, and then keep them and engage them with our app. Knowing how to do this empowers marketers to optimize ad spend and scale their app growth.

Luckily, our Audience Builder makes targeting, retargeting, and engagement easy, all while maintaining the utmost respect for users’ data privacy. With our tool, advertisers can define segmentation rules based on actual app user attributes and events within any timeframe, country, OS or across different apps they are tracking. Once created, they can export audiences as a list of advertising IDs directly from their Adjust dashboard and upload these lists to partners like Facebook. Before Audience Builder, many advertisers did not have the ability to pass this type of data on, due to internal or external privacy regulations, or because of limited resources.

Adjust’s clients have seen success from using this solution. A notable case study would be health and fitness app developer Runtastic. They realized well over 200% improvement of their return on advertising spend, and a 900% improvement of users registering and purchasing a subscription in just seven days — a significant outperformance to benchmark campaigns that run without Audience Builder.

How would your customers benefit from the report? 

This report is a guide for our clients to target the markets presenting the biggest growth opportunities before they launch their app. The insights will help marketers improve their tactics, and reduce lengthy discussions that frequently hold their go-to-market strategies back.

According to the report, consumers from the South-East Asian countries are fastest in app adoption. What are your thoughts?

Southeast Asian users didn’t follow the typical pattern of going from PC, to laptop, to mobile, but jumped straight to smartphones — making the region truly mobile-first. The smartphone penetration rate in Indonesia, for example, is around 47.6%, up from 24% in 2013.

Our report finds that the majority of Southeast Asia has seen a similarly meteoric rise in mobile. Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar are three of the fastest-growing nations for mobile apps. That means huge opportunities for app marketers across the Asia Pacific region.

The APAC market is relatively advanced; but as with all our markets, we continue to focus heavily on customer education. The mobile industry is extremely complex and moves at a very high speed. To help keep our clients informed and up to date, we hold regular conferences and workshops and release various ebooks, case studies and webinars. Our goal is to help marketers become the best possible mobile experts out there.

Could you tell us about the metrics you measured to distinguish between various app types? Why do you think consumers have better preference to install Entertainment and Gaming apps compared to business apps?

For this report, we used the Growth Score, a metric developed by Adjust to chart the rise of apps in global markets. It’s calculated by dividing the total app installs per month by the number of monthly active users (MAU) for each vertical and country to reveal the rate of growth from installs relative to the MAU base.

The Mobile Growth Map report also introduces the Retention Factor, a brand new Adjust metric enabling marketers to gauge the success and failure of paid campaigns. In practice, the Retention Factor — which is calculated by dividing organic retention by paid retention — helps marketers see which countries are best to invest in by showing where paid traffic is closer to organic. Our data reveals that organic users retain better overall.

With low retention rates unchanged, keeping loyal app users remains a challenge for mobile marketers across industry verticals. But it’s important to bear in mind that an app user’s lifecycle isn’t a linear journey. Just because a user loses interest in an app for a certain number of days doesn’t mean they will never come back.

But if you have the right data points, and track at which points your users drop off, you can fight these low rates.

How does Adjust enable B2B companies to retain app user base? 

To make the most of growth and retention opportunities, app marketers need the highest-quality analytics and measurement solutions to find and retain valuable users. Adjust helps them by giving them the ultimate insights to drive their brands’ growth. With our platform, marketers can easily understand their performance across channels, protect themselves against fraud, and have the power to create and manage sophisticated campaigns in just a few clicks.

What kind of disruptions do you predict in the industry for 2020-2022?

Adjust is most excited to see how Marketing Automation will change and enhance how marketers work. When we look at the challenge today of a UA manager, they spend 80% of their time going in and out of so many disparate tools, dashboards and data sources. That’s not what Marketing should be.

Automation will simplify marketers’ workflow and help them regain the time lost to repetitive — and easily automated — tasks, and empower them to focus on what they do best: creating, strategizing and pushing boundaries. The future marketer will know how to make smart, efficient use of data, and our goal is to provide a platform for our clients so that they can focus on the creative part.

We believe that AI will augment marketers’ jobs; not replace them, and it will become a race of the minds; not the race of the hands that can click the most. Jobs will become more of an intellectual task and less of a grind.