Aarki 2018 Year in Review


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It’s the beginning of the year and a good time to reflect on what we've done in the past twelve months. With that in mind, here’s a look back at Aarki’s top achievements in 2018.

New Retargeting Capabilities

Reaching the right user, with the right message, at the right time is key especially for any retargeting strategy. With the tremendous growth and success of retargeting in 2018, we’ve invested extensively in audience management and targeting. Some of our retargeting efforts this year include:

  • Not every advertiser has the partner or in-house resources to create and manage audience segments for retargeting, so Aarki worked with several of our advertisers in 2018 to build tools to create and manage audience segments on their behalf.
  • We launched an audience segment intersection tool to allow our campaign managers to create audience segment combinations on the fly. Audience intersections are a powerful tool to customize general audience segments for more granular media and creative optimization, including personalized creative messaging.  
  • Have a lot of audience attributes to work with? Aarki now supports a new way of sending audience attributes: multiple attributes per user. Instead of managing multiple audience lists, we can now ingest attributes on a user level and build segments directly or even use this data for modeling on both the retargeting and user acquisition side to further enhance our clients’ campaigns.

With all these enhancements in retargeting capabilities, we make sure that each segment of our partners’ audiences sees the ad creatives that are aligned with their app activity.

Bidder & Infrastructure

Behind the scenes, we've been working continually on our bidder and bidder infrastructure:

  • We have increased the speed and efficiency of our bidder to support the rapid growth of campaigns managed via Aarki Encore.
  • We’ve launched a second datacenter location on the US East Coast in Virginia, bringing the total number of our physical locations to five.
  • We doubled the number of servers globally.

Our datacenter growth has allowed us to expand existing partnerships and integrate with more ad exchanges enabling us to fuel our increase in global demand.

Model Improvements

Aarki’s vision is to advance data science and machine learning to solve core problems in mobile advertising. To achieve this, we are continuously optimizing our models. Here is a high-level overview of a number of optimizations done in 2018 which led to a more precise evaluation of user behavior:

  • We improved engagement and purchase optimization capabilities in our post-install behavior model
  • Learned a detailed app taxonomy using app embeddings and clustering, improving predictive performance and lookalike modeling power
  • Added joint response delay modeling, allowing us to predict the time from install to in-app engagement or purchase
  • Updated retargeting and cross-promotion models
  • Supported multiple target optimizations

Creative is Still King

We have made several updates to our creative platform, Aarki Studio, which speeded up the ad creation process even more and improved the campaign performance:

  • With usability updates in our timeline feature, we made it easier for creative variants to inherit animation settings, making it even easier to create highly engaging and compelling ad creatives.
  • The new navigation update simplifies the campaign management process by allowing quick management and review of ad creatives - with key actions and information on creatives now available in a single view.

The creative personalization is another way we are advancing our ad creative. We are now able to deliver customized messages that are aligned with users’ interests even more and we ensure that users see highly personalized ad creatives.

We've seen an increase in engagement from personalized creatives and will be expanding our personalization efforts in the next year.

Awards & Events

All the work done during the past twelve months has been recognized by the awards we garnered in 2018:

  • Aarki was ranked number 19 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and energy tech companies in North America, and number 4 in the Bay Area.
  • The Horizon Interactive Awards honored Aarki with the “Best in Category” award for Online Ads for our Gardenscapes Interactive Ad for Playrix.
  • Aarki was honored by the award for “Best Client Services Team” and a commendation for the “Best AdOps Team” categories at The Wires by Exchangewire.

In addition to the numerous events we attended and sponsored during 2018, we launched our first Programmatic Connect event in partnership with MoPub, gathering app marketers for an insightful afternoon discussing mobile programmatic. The event will be run globally in 2019 so keep an eye on our blog to learn when we will be in your city.

Much more to come in 2019—we’ll see you then!

Thank you to everyone who made our year! We are excited to continue our collaboration in the coming year and rock the mobile advertising world with new and innovative solutions.

 

Topics: Company News