It’s the beginning of the year, a great time to look back at what happened in 2017 and look ahead to what 2018 may have in store for us.
The mobile programmatic industry was a fast growing sector in 2017 and we saw a lot of advancements in technology and strategies for acquiring and retaining high LTV users. Nevertheless, we faced challenges which were an impetus for thinking wider, acting smarter, and finding better, more comprehensive solutions.
Transparency
With spend growing by more than 72% over the past three years, programmatic is the backbone of online advertising. For advertisers, automated buys allow smarter and more efficient data-driven transactions at scale. However, even with these considerable benefits, some advertisers struggle with growing brand safety and transparency challenges across the programmatic ecosystem, according to AdExchanger.
To acknowledge the growing need for transparency and quality installs, we took campaign management to the next level last year by providing advertisers with their full campaign performance, creative variants, and media placement details in real time, letting them make decisions to drive stronger ROI.
Global Infrastructure
To keep pace with the increasing demand, we enhanced our bidder algorithm and increased the speed at which we onboard and scale new supply sources—we’ve added three new data centers (APAC, EMEA, and a second US East location) and integrated with more leading ad exchanges, allowing us to fuel our increase in global demand.
These advancements led us to reach an 8x increase in revenue compared to 2016, generated from a number of evergreen accounts from the top grossing social casino and casual games categories.
Power of Creatives
For programmatic creative to be successful, according to ExchangeWire, agencies need to take down the walls between creative, data, and media planning, and to upend the process so that these stakeholders are working together from day one.
Through our data-driven creatives and continuous ROI analysis, we developed highly engaging HTML5 creatives and videos scaling our campaigns. As a result, we serve far-reaching and compelling creatives that perform better and deliver higher ROI.
Plus, our focus on usability updates and tools to simplify production allowed our creative team to create compelling creatives that tell brand stories in a more resonant way. We also added several features in our proprietary creative platform, Aarki Studio, such as the scrubbing feature that simplified the process of creating engaging and catchy creatives and added custom fonts to Studio, allowing more flexibility in creating ad copy.
Our growth has been phenomenal and we are expecting 2018 to be as successful as 2017. Keep an eye on our blog for the second part of this series that will focus on the expectations we have for 2018.