“The increased time that people spend on mobile and how important mobile is today it’s just going to increase, apps are not going away any time soon,” the co-founder and CEO of adjust, Christian Henschel joins ‎adjust’s managing director AU/NZ & Indonesia John Sardelic to chat with B&T about the future of mobile apps and how brands can use adjust.

adjust is a business intelligence platform for mobile apps which provides analytics for companies such as Ebay, PayPal, Microsoft and Spotify, as well as the Rocket Internet group’s 140 mobile accounts including Foodpanda, The Iconic and Vaniday.

The company started in 2012 in Berlin, since then it has expanded to offices in San Francisco, Istanbul, Beijing, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris and Sydney. Every month, adjust analyses data from 14,000 apps on more than 1.5 billion mobile devices.

Henschel believes adjust solves a big problem for brands with a mobile app: the number of people downloading the app, interacting with the content, the duration and the advertising spend. “I think one of the biggest questions that marketers have is ‘do I spend my budget in the right way or do I just waste it?’.  I think we have developed a technology which actually answers that question.

“We make sure on behalf of our clients that they know exactly where those new users or existing users come from, that’s the first and biggest part of the platform. Secondly, we also have a huge analytics part of adjust which actually enables them to understand what those users are doing.  The third piece of the platform is about how their specific app is ranking in the app store because the mobile app environment is very different from the online space.”

Unlike the online website space, the mobile world is controlled by the two big players the Google’s Android store and Apple’s App store. The rankings, reviews, position and comments on mobile apps are all channeled to these two stores.

However launching adjust in Australia wasn’t without its difficulties, especially the lack of mobile marketing education among Australian businesses.

Sardelic said the biggest challenge is the lack of knowledge about mobile app attribution in Australia. “When you speak to brands and clients here and you talk to them about attribution, they often assume it’s from the desktop or online perspective, where cookies rule the world.

“But mobile app is completely different – it’s a completely different ecosystem, it’s a new way of thinking, you really need to know what’s going on not only from a technological point of view but also from a service perspective.”