One of the first questions I asked Localytics co-founder Raj Aggarwal was what prompted him to start a mobile analytics company. What he told me was simple, but true: “There’s a hole that needs to be filled for more powerful analytics.”
While Localytics only launched in the fall of 2008, they have already developed an industry-leading mobile analytics platform for publishers. They have been providing a free model of their analytics to publishers since they launched, and just last Tuesday, Localytics released their enterprise solutions.
During this recent launch, Localytics was able to announce two large publishers who will be using their enterprise solutions, KAYAK and CardStar. It should come as no surprising that they are already attracting large publishers to the new service, because their other analytics technologies are seriously powerful and well-known in the mobile space. Before the enterprise launch, Localytics was already providing solutions for over 400 publishers.
Why all the buzz?
Localytics provides the only realtime mobile analytics in the industry.
In the world of mobile, this is massively important to publishers such as KAYAK, who need to react to changing data throughout the day, not just at day’s end.
Localytics is also the only mobile analytics company able to provide publishers the ability to export hourly granular data. This allows for cross-media analysis, conversion tracking and consolidated storage.
According to Aggarwal, these unparalleled features were important to the Localytics team, because they wanted to “be much more focused and attractive to big publishers.”
But Localytics didn’t stop after they figured out how to provide great data. The company also has the ability to splice and compare a variety of data side-by-side. This is important because other analytics companies provide a limited number of reports, and those are the only ways for publishers to compare data unless they want to break it down themselves.
Localytics allows for data to be put directly on top of other data for easy analysis, as well as incredibly deep drilling into the information. This provides publishers with an unparalleled look into their daily usage by numbers, platform, software, hardware, region, language, and carrier, among many others (Demo).
Large publishers will also like Localytics’ ease-of-use. Because it is open-source, it easily integrates with their existing back-end systems. This also means that Localytics has a very minimal performance impact on applications. Ideally, the best analytics tools will break down everything your users are doing without bogging down their experience.
Adding Localytics to your application only takes a few lines of code and can literally be integrated in ten minutes, so it’s appealing to independent application developers and large publishes alike.
Aggarwal and the Localytics team have a long history of experience in mobile application development as well as analytics creation, here in the Boston area. In his view, Boston has a “strong mobile community,” and that has allowed Localytics to work with a wealth of mobile talent. This solid mobile community in Boston has been critical for their product development.
That community value is a big deal for a small team like the one at Localytics — which also includes Henry Cipolla, Andrew Rollins, Brian Suthoff and Nikhil Kalgatgi.
The mobile web is gaining steam at an incredible rate, so the “hole” Aggarwal mentioned at the beginning of our interview is only expected to become a more glaring problem in the industry. Look for Localytics to grow in step with the demand for better mobile analytics.
