A wide array of industries are increasingly tapping into the power of big data to unearth more information about their respective audiences. As of Tuesday, indie mobile app developers and publishers emerge to leverage big data analytics to meet their own needs, as well, thanks to the launch of Splitforce's A/B testing library for Unity mobile apps.
"While solutions for app analytics like Localytics and Flurry have existed for quite some time, and there are more and more of them proliferating, the opportunity to provide analytics and A/B testing for the Unity community has been ignored," Splitforce Co-founder Zac Aghion told BostInno.
Given the jump in popularity of free-to-play mobile games, app developers and large publishers have begun to turn to analytics to improve key metrics like average revenue per user and player retention rates. One of these methods is A/B testing, in which multiple versions of the same product – be it an app, a website or advertisement – are delivered at the same time to different consumers and tracked to reveal which version is best at driving consumer behavior.
The startup makes this methodology available to the over two million developers of Unity apps. For those who aren't familiar with this genre of app, Unity is the platform powering some of the largest games on iOS, Android, Xbox and Facebook, such as ChopChopNinja and EA Games.
Splitforce was founded just last June. The company recently finished up Chinaccelerator, the Dalian-based accelerator started by Boston Techstars mentor Cyril Ebersweiler and backed by SOS Ventures, an Irish VC firm that also serves as a limited partner in California's 500 Startups. Though the four-person company has largely been working out of Beijing, Aghion, who is originally from Concord, Mass., said that the team is in the process of picking an East Coast headquarters location. Boston made the short list.
According to Aghion, Splitforce has already raised 25 percent of its post-incubator seed round, which it's using to accelerate growth and scale up marketing and accelerate software development. However, the startup is actively looking to raise $350,000 by the end of February 2014.
But, said Aghion, "We're not in a huge rush. It's more important to have right investors on board and grow the company the right way."
Given that the company is already making revenue, it looks like Splitforce can afford to wait. Though Aghion couldn't disclose all the clients signed on to Splitforce's library, the earliest revenue is coming from PandaBus. Used in many Chinese cities, the GPS-driven mobile application shows users where and when the next municipal bus will arrive, while also giving them location-targeted advertising.
Overall, Splitforce has served A/B tests to mobile apps and games across 153 countries. Some tests have even had the effect of improving in-app purchase conversion rates up to 125 percent, which is a big win for apps that rely on such revenue streams. (Check out the analytics data below for an example.)
Boston's burgeoning mobile community could use one more talented team in the big data space. With Localytics, as well as HubSpot, here, Boston makes a strong argument for a young startup looking to strike into the mobile analytics and publishing space, like Splitforce.
