Scenario
Performance marketing has increasingly become a necessary tool that allows digital marketers to run more efficient―and successful―advertising campaigns. It’s a winning digital-marketing strategy that gives publishers and retailers the ability to truly target campaigns in a ROI-driven way, all based on performance (sales, downloads, bookings, etc.) However, as interest in performance marketing has grown, many of the technology providers haven’t kept pace. Their platforms don’t have the infrastructures to handle the massive growth of mobile traffic volumes, the intricacies of in-app mobile advertising, or databases capable of making information accessible.
Everflow Technologies Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, has quickly become one of the performance tracking and analytics platforms changing the face of the industry. Its performance-marketing platform provides tools for brands and agencies to track and manage all of their performance partnerships, media buying channels and influencers. Everflow’s success has quickly materialized because other technologies in the marketplace lack its powerful cloud infrastructure, usability and the granular data analytics needed by today’s marketers. Its focus on data and on a clean, simple user experience comes from a veteran team with decades in the business.
“Our platform runs on data that matters,” said Jonathan Blais, co-founder and CTO at Everflow. “For example, it’s essential for marketers to be able to set and track geolocation rules to reach their target audiences. Originally, we used a low-cost geolocation data provider that was not delivering the reliable and accurate results that our customers need for their campaigns.”
Everflow allows its clients to set up offers with extremely granular targeting down to the city and DMA levels. Its customers realize significant gains by being able to target via high-level geolocation data and optimizing channels based on very in-depth regional performance metrics.
“A core benefit of using Everflow is our ability to instantly access data through our Google Cloud BigQuery infrastructure, letting customers drill down and pivot data inside their platforms,” said Blais. “Our customers need their data to be accurate to continually optimize their campaigns. After seeing a consistent amount of discrepancies between the geolocation data we were using and what the Mobile Measurement Partners were seeing, it became apparent that we needed to find another geolocation data and services provider.”
Because Everflow’s platform relies so heavily on incorporating the most up-to-date, reliable and comprehensive datasets, it made the decision to switch to Digital Element’s NetAcuity® solution in November 2017
The Solution
Everflow queried its Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs), among them AppsFlyer, that were already using Digital Element’s high-quality data with success. That helped Blais make the decision to change providers easier. Additionally, he referenced an academic paper from Israel “A Geolocation Databases Study” as another factor he considered when selecting Digital Element. “Our tech team read through it and was convinced that Digital Element’s methodology was a superior approach to many of the competitors in the marketplace,” Blais added.
Everflow incorporates Digital Element’s NetAcuity EdgeTM solution into its performance-marketing platform. NetAcuity Edge is a global hyperlocal IP geolocation offering that provides unmatched accuracy at the city/town and ZIP/postcode levels. Country, region, city, DMA, mobile carrier, ISP and proxies are among the key datasets that Everflow now uses.
“Digital Element’s data has enhanced our targeting capabilities exponentially,” said Blais. “The addition of datasets that allow us to block proxies has become a hugely valuable feature for us to offer clients internationally. Proxy data solves a problem that our clients know exists, but is not necessarily something they’d know to ask for.”
On average, Everflow tracks approximately 11 billion clicks and impressions through its system on a monthly basis and has benefited immensely from Digital Element’s reliability, accuracy, coverage and depth of data.
“The richness and accuracy of the data, not to mention the ongoing support provided by a very veteran team, was incomparable to our prior solution,” said Blais. “We’ve been pleased with the entire experience. One unexpectedly helpful outcome for our tech team was that all of the data from Digital Element was extremely well organized, which made both individual tasks like pulling ISPs easy, as well as the full integration and utilization process painless.
Success
Everflow is the performance-marketing platform of choice for hundreds of agencies, ad networks, and brands. It depends heavily on having a reliable and accurate geolocation solution.“Comprehensive and accurate targeting allows us to enable customers to deliver the right message, at the right place, at the right time,” said Michael Cole, director of marketing at Everflow. “Having accurate geolocation targeting is so essential to delivering high-performing campaigns. That’s what modern marketing is all about.”For example, marketers can use Everflow’s analytics report to break down city data:
When examining city-level performance, the base conversion-to-event rate for Los Angeles is 14 percent, but only 9 percent for Chicago. This data provides marketers with an opportunity to test how they can improve an underachieving city’s performance, or whether they should adjust their campaign strategy accordingly.Media buyers can make huge optimization gains by diving deeper and viewing opportunities on a granular level. In this next example, when looking at the highest revenue cities, everything looks good:
However, if more pinpointed locations are examined where marketers are buying traffic and driving no revenue, then they can quickly drive a nice boost to their margins by deactivating those sources―assuming that they’ve collected enough volume for this data to be statistically relevant.
“Everflow went from a concept on paper in 2016 to a bootstrapped go-to-market solution with 200-plus clients,” said Blais. “Industry-leading partners such as Digital Element were essential in supplying the data and reliability to help get us where we are today. And, as the mobile marketplace continues to demand more high-performance marketing solutions, we expect Digital Element will help us go even further.”