MoPub case study
We run our business on Metamarkets—it helps us grow revenue.
Recently, the Metamarkets team spoke with Kevin Weatherman, VP of Business Development at MoPub, to find out about the value Metamarkets brings to his company. As a seasoned online advertising professional and one of the early adopters of Metamarkets, Kevin had a wealth of information to share with us on how our solution helps online companies like MoPub succeed.
Why did you choose Metamarkets to power the analytics for your Marketplace?
Kevin: MoPub Marketplace was launched with Metamarkets as our analytics solution in October 2011. The Marketplace is our proprietary real-time bidding (RTB) auction platform that connects mobile app publishers to demand-side platforms, ad networks, and first party advertisers.
We knew very early on that RTB metrics and analytics were going to be very important for us as a company and so we ensured we had the right analytics solution in place before we launched MoPub Marketplace. When our CEO, Jim Payne, first used Metamarkets, he immediately realized that this was the solution we had been looking for. We knew it would give us the data and metrics we needed to measure our real-time business.
Why is Metamarkets’ real-time analytics important for your business?
Kevin: It is critical for a real-time business like ours to be able to glean performance data for publishers and demand partners as soon as possible. We cannot afford to wait to be informed of lost sales several days after the fact, so we have invested in a number of tools to provide operational intelligence, including Metamarkets.
Metamarkets’ real-time analytics helps us immediately see fluctuations in revenue. We have other internal tools to track real-time data as well, but the revenue-per-minute and the revenue-per-second metrics that we view via Metamarkets is most meaningful to us.
How has Metamarkets supported your rapid growth?
Kevin: Since the inception of the company in the fall of 2010, our growth has been tremendous and we now run the world’s largest ad exchange for smartphone apps, MoPub Marketplace.
Throughout this rapid growth, Metamarkets has scaled with us, seamlessly analyzing ever- increasing volumes of data.
What kind of real-time metrics is Metamarkets providing you at an executive level?
Kevin: Metamarkets gives me a pulse of my business in real-time. I spend a lot of time in Metamarkets on a daily basis. Probably 20 times a day, I check the real-time dashboard to see performance in hourly as well as 10-minute segments.
We measure our company around maximizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) common in real- time bidding, including auction volume, clear-rate, and ‘Cost Per Thousand’ (CPM), amongst about a dozen other metrics.
Metamarkets gives us clear visibility into how we are performing on our KPIs. The solution measures the metrics that are unique to our business and is flexible enough to allow the addition of new metrics as we realize we need them.
How does your publisher team use Metamarkets to grow your business?
Kevin: Metamarkets provides us a better understanding of publisher performance; informing us of the quality of publishers needed to grow our business.
The publisher team is responsible for bringing on publishers who supply ad impressions. This team cares about detailed metrics like CPM by ad type, clear-rate by geography and Click-Through Rates (CTRs) by publisher.
In addition to these metrics, Metamarkets also allows the team to easily perform their own analysis like comparing publishers and CTRs, giving them rich insights.
How does your demand team use Metamarkets to deliver customer value?
Kevin: We leverage the data within Metamarkets to consult with our partners and match them with the kind of ad impressions their businesses need – delivering immediate value.
The demand side of the business is responsible for clearing the most ad impressions at the optimal CPM. They will look at the variables each Demand Side Partner (DSP) is buying on and the attractiveness of different types of inventory. By understanding their needs, we are able to help them optimize their ad spend.
Our DSPs also use Metamarkets to make their business decisions on how and where to spend across the MoPub Marketplace. For some of our DSPs, Metamarkets is their Holy Grail. They use it
to make business decisions around ad spend and revenue and get the data that they need to report performance to their own clients.
How has Metamarkets helped you save on engineering costs?
Kevin: Having such a robust real-time analytics solution, allows our business teams to have more flexibility in the kinds of metrics we track without investing internally in building them. Some of the capabilities would take us a long time to build, whereas Metamarkets has the data scientists and visualization experts to deliver that to us right away. We rely on Metamarkets to provide the data we need, so our engineering team can focus on building our core technology.
Have you recommended Metamarkets to anyone? Why?
Kevin: Almost daily!
I encourage anybody who wants to run their business more efficiently, make data-driven decisions, and have access to key metrics readily available, to consider Metamarkets.
Metamarkets’ ability to find key insights allows us to execute on opportunities that would not have existed if we did not have that data.
