Thursday, July 28, 2011

Fiksu flaunts mobile app marketing data

By Rodney H. Brown

Boston-based Fiksu Inc. – which started life as Fluent Mobile – has launched a pair of indexes that it hopes will both show mobile app marketers the kind of benchmarks they need to be paying attention to, and possibly draw in customers to Fiksu’s mobile app marketing technology.

“We want to help build the ecosystem,” said Fiksu CEO and co-founder Micah Adler. “If this helps lead to people coming to our service, so much the better.”

That ecosystem is the still fledgling area of mobile application marketing, which Adler says was mostly a game of guesswork, even for Fluent Mobile, which was a mobile app developer that in June of 2009 launched an iPhone news reader app. Once he saw the inevitable drop off in new customers downloading the app from the Apple Inc. App Store, Adler decided to look into making a platform that would apply algorithmic techniques to customer acquisition for app developers – initially just for internal use.

When they applied the result of about six months’ worth of rigorous coding to its own news reader, Fluent saw the app download numbers climb from hundreds per day to multiple thousands, Adler said. Then came the hard decision – continue as an app developer or take this new marketing technology and sell it as a service.

Once the choice was made last summer, Adler kept the company branded as Fluent for more than another six months, only officially renaming the company to Fiksu in April of this year, when it officially rolled out the new marketing tech.

Now that it has had a few months’ worth of data under its belt, Fiksu has put out a pair of indices around the mobile app marketing space. The first is the Fiksu App Store Competitive Index, which shows data about the top 200 free iPhone apps downloaded, and the Fiksu Cost per Loyal User Index, which shows how much a company spends to get each loyal app customer – on average $1.08, according to Fiksu.

Those two pieces of data are what mobile app marketers should be most interested in, Adler said.

“What we believe is that it’s still early days for mobile marketing, and app marketing more specifically, and there is a lot of lack of understanding of what one should be expecting from the mobile marketplace,” he said.

While the data is currently just for iOS devices, Adler says Android-based apps will have their own indices soon.

The venture-backed company most recently raised $5.5 million from new investors in December of 2010, led by Charles River Ventures. That brought the total funds raised to at least $7 million, and Adler says the 50-plus employee company isn’t in the market for any more right now.

“We are not currently looking for money and don’t have any sort of fundraising plans on the table right now,” he said.

Data from the indices in the release from Fiksu:

Key data points from the first Fiksu Indexes, which spanned March to June, include:

• App Store Competitive Index: April 2011 was the most competitive month – the Top 200 ranked free iPhone apps amassed an aggregate average of 4.61 million downloads per day. In May, this dropped to 3.78 million downloads per day but in June rose again to 4.505 million per day (a month in which Apple reported one billion total downloads).

• Cost per Loyal User Index: The index reported a steady increase: from 94 cents in March to $1.10 in May and $1.27 in June.