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Venture Capital News: Liftoff Raises $5M Series A

2015-02-04
MENLO PARK, CA, Fast-growing mobile app marketing and retargeting platform announced that it closed $5 million in Series A funding.
Liftoff Inc., a fast-growing mobile app marketing and retargeting platform, today released it's first quarterly Mobile App Engagement Index Report. The Index measures high value actions a mobile user takes after installing an app, such as registering, sharing content, making a reservation or purchase, and subscribing to a service. The index helps mobile marketers benchmark their app install ad campaign performance against industry metrics to better quantify their true ROI potential.
Liftoff also announced that it closed $5 million in Series A funding to further accelerate the company's growth in CPA-optimized mobile user acquisition. The investment was led by Steve Anderson (Baseline Ventures), with participation from Michael Dearing (Harrison Metal) and existing seed investors, a few of which include Fred Warren (Sage Venture Partners), Shinya Akamine (Core Ventures Group), Tim Koogle (former CEO of Yahoo!) and Ilya Sukhar (Facebook).
'The funding we received validates our focus on CPA-optimized mobile app install ads' said Mark Ellis, CEO. 'While most mobile marketers have traditionally spent money acquiring installs that never convert into high value users, Liftoff now helps marketers acquire mobile users that take more profitable actions beyond the install, like making a purchase, reserving a hotel room or renewing a subscription.'
Most mobile app advertising campaigns are measured on a cost-per-install (CPI) basis. While buying on CPI is convenient for both the advertiser and the supplier, CPI provides little insight into the true value of the new user or the ROI of the advertising campaign. To address this knowledge gap in the mobile marketing industry, Liftoff analyzed all of their Q4'14 mobile marketing campaigns to establish benchmarks on both post-install conversion rates and effective cost-per-action for a variety of post-install events.
There were several interesting findings, from differences in cost-per-action and conversion rates between iOS and Android to the impact on cost for a given engagement event, depending on where it appears in the post-install funnel, to different CPA metrics within particular app categories. You can download a copy of the Index report at http://info.liftoff.io/index-report
Liftoff app marketing campaigns are powered by a database of over 1.1 billion mobile profiles, enabling both Facebook-style targeting and lookalike targeting across the entire mobile RTB ecosystem. Marketing campaigns are managed programmatically and optimized in real-time through the Liftoff Optimization Engine.
'Liftoff fundamentally changes the rules of mobile app marketing', say Ellis. 'By shifting from a cost-per-install to a cost-per-engagement model, Liftoff de-risks the marketing spend and offers mobile marketers a true CPA experience.'
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