Dive Brief:
- Yozio, a firm that tracks the source of click-throughs to mobile apps, has raised $7 million to build more tools for developers, adding to its initial $1.6 million.
- The company has added more than 500 clients since its launch in January, including companies such as Airbnb and Pinterest.
- App usage was up 76% last year, according to a report from analytics firm Flurry, and time spent with shopping apps jumped 174%.
Dive Insight:
Yozio has attracted $7 million in financing to help it build its mobile attribution tools and help mobile-friendly sellers find out what encouraged click-throughs, downloads, and sales. The company creates SDKs that allow mobile apps to log link activity and identify the devices used to follow that link.
As the variety of channels grows, the number of routes into the conversion funnel has exploded—but sellers still want to know what led to click-through to assist in retargeting and the allocation of marketing dollars. Mobile apps are particularly hard to track, since they circumvent the mobile web to download directly to smartphones and tablets from app stores.
Yozio and similar software companies such as Branch Metrics and Tapstream are racing to help retailers dependent on in-app sales like Etsy, Pinterest, and Wanelo find customers and reduce friction in the sales process by tracking inbound links—including notoriously hard-to-track in-app links—across platforms.