Tenjin, the leading mobile marketing measurement platform for indie and mid-sized mobile game publishers, and GameAnalytics, the player analysis platform of choice for mobile game developers, have launched Growth FullStack, the first in a new series of developer tools and training resources offering affordable access to data and analyses.
Launched to coincide with the release of iOS15, Growth FullStack empowers mobile developers to navigate a privacy-centric marketing landscape that requires a unified approach to managing significant amounts of disparate datasets. Unable to use Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) and with low numbers of mobile users opting to share their user-level data with apps, marketers have been left with scattered datasets that haven’t been utilized effectively for performance marketing. Similar changes are imminent on Android, impacting the entire app developer ecosystem.
Large app publishers have already figured out that consolidated, better-analyzed data is the solution. However, the huge data science and R&D teams large publishers operate are unattainable for 99% of mobile publishers. The vast majority are caught in a transition period where familiar, Mobile Measurement Partner-centric deterministic attribution is not working anymore and Apple-centric attribution such as iOS15’s SKAdNetwork isn’t widely understood.
Growth FullStack enables mobile publishers to collect the data that they need, store it in the way they want, and optimize their campaigns activity using off-the-shelf or custom analyses. Enabled by a no-code ‘plug and play’ model, mobile marketers no longer need to depend on in-house data engineering to unify and understand complex data sets.
Announcing Growth FullStack, Tenjin CEO and Co-Founder, Christopher Farm said:
“We’re excited to partner with GameAnalytics to offer Growth FullStack. The inspiration was our joint understanding that mobile marketers have their own siloed data sources, databases and analyses – sometimes multiple of each – but no way to draw them together post-IDFA. Paired with iOS14 and 15 redacting some of the important dimensions (for example country data sets) finding ways to build a network of data within Growth FullStack provides the tools and training for mobile publishers to achieve the similar insights like big publishers are used to, enabling them to focus on building their apps and games. GameAnalytics and Tenjin both have very popular free platforms and share a commitment to educating our clients, so we’re delighted to be working together to help great apps grow in the new privacy-first world.”
Morten E. Wulff, Chairman and Founder at GameAnalytics, added:
“We’re thrilled to be announcing our new partnership with Tenjin, which is perfectly aligned to help us deliver best-in-class developer tools. Conversations with our mutual mobile game clients showed that they want us to offer services across their full stack of data tools, and Growth FullStack is the first in a suite of collaborative products that will supercharge the switch to Apple & Android-centric attribution. Mobile performance marketing architecture has been thrown into disarray during 2021 for publishers worldwide, but with Growth FullStack any mobile publisher can run new analyses of previously diffuse datasets with no in-house expertise.”
Growth FullStack has been operating in early access and trialed by publishers including Lucky Kat Studios.
Hernan Zhou, Co-Founder and CTO at Lucky Kat Studios, commented:
“Indie game developers need help to make sense of the post-IDFA world of mobile marketing. Old tools aren’t able to support user acquisition as they did before iOS14 and the data sources we have access to require far more analysis to generate insights. For example, one of our main user acquisition channels now has two APIs for the same data: Apple’s data and their own data. How do we figure out which is best to help us grow? Ultimately we want to focus our energy on making games, and Growth FullStack will be vital in enabling that.”
Based on the recent news we’ve interviewed the CEO of Tenjin
Batuhan Avucan: What behaviors do you expect from smaller game publishers when it comes to accessing the new insights of their games?
Christopher Farm: I expect them to run plenty of experiments on new datasets. Growth FullStack provides developers with all of the building blocks that they need to ingest and join data from various sources — similar to what the bigger publishers build on their own. We are excited to see what the developers will do with these building blocks. Starting to join disparate data sets together with no deterministic joins requires a lot of development and testing to get right.
Batuhan Avucan: Do you think smaller game publishers will take market share over big publishers with this tool?
Christopher Farm: I think it will give them a chance to do it if they have a good game. At the moment, there are so many challenges that even big publishers don’t know how to solve. For example, SKAdNetwork and country data. Most of the publishers are used to bid (buy installs) on a county level, but there is no country data in the data sets from SKAdNetwork. Therefore, publishers will need to run more extensive analysis even for the things that previously were considered to be obvious – eg (CPI on Country level).
Batuhan Avucan: Does privacy mean the end of personalization and excellent user experience?
Christopher Farm: It’s hard to say. I think it’s a matter of personal preference. The problem is that most of the users don’t know that they are sacrificing their user experience when they are opting out. I think most of them don’t realize that they are opting out, this is just something they do automatically. Just for the sake of experiment, I’ve turned off personalized ads in some of my apps and I’ve, of course, got a ton of irrelevant ads. I am sure ad networks are going to address that – see Facebook rebuilding their ads. There’s a lot of research in both camps that say things will or won’t be affected.
Batuhan Avucan: Both companies care about educating the clients on their marketing efforts. What’s the long-term vision for both companies for educating the industry?
Christopher Farm: We will continue to provide Training on Growth FullStack. There will always be a free tier of Training. By training I mean not only the guides and training materials but also the code, queries, dashboard templates. The things that developers can implement by themselves without any assistance from a data engineer. Our goal was to make sure that any Studio founder or UA manager can implement those without any prior knowledge. Also, we are making sure that we support all of the free tools in the market like Google Spreadsheet or Google Data Studio. We want to make sure that studios that don’t have budget for comprehensive tooling can get all of the benefits of Growth FullStack
Batuhan Avucan: What will be the ideal future of this tool and the collaboration of two companies?
Christopher Farm: At this moment we are solely focused on Growth FullStack ETL tools. There are so many challenges that mobile developers have right now regarding different sets of data getting piped into a single location. We want to provide this infrastructure starting from obvious use cases that already exist.
