gWallet, a startup that handles offers for social apps, is announcing today a new platform that makes it easier to measure how offers impact how apps are spread and monetized.
The San Francisco company has been testing the gLTV platform for a month with its customers. The goal is to create something that other offer providers don’t, said Gurbaksh Chahal, chief executive and founder of gWallet.
Offers are ads that give social app users an alternative to paying with a credit card. The advertisers make a special offer to the user, who can accept it and thereby fulfill payment for the app. They might sign up for a credit card or a subscription to Netflix, for example. The offer industry got into a scandal recently as some of the offers were perceived as scams.
Chahal said his company got into the business to clean up offers and give app publishers more control over the offers associated with their apps. It won’t be easy to live up to that claim, since rivals such as Offerpal Media, TrialPay, Adknowledge and others say they already have or are in the process of cleaning up their offers.
But Chahal said that gWallet’s platform gives publishers more visibility into their business. They can see, for instance, whether customers are turned off by offers or if they accept the same ones over and over. Chahal said his company is courting high-end advertisers, such as well known brands, to be his first customers. These brands don’t want to be associated with scams and are coming up with clever offers that consumers will actually like, Chahal said. It would be great, for instance, if users spent minutes engaged with the offer content, rather than seconds, even if all they really want is to earn virtual currency that they can spend in games.
“This business is only about 18 months old and it doesn’t have the right metrics yet,” Chahal said. “It has to be more transparent.”
The goal is to allow publishers to tweak offers so that they can increase how much revenue they generate from their consumers over time. With better metrics, it becomes a lot easier to spot problem offers or the best ones and then tweak the system to emphasize the best ones. I can’t say this is unique for sure and that the other offer providers can’t do this. But this is the gWallet sales pitch.
This focus on the “lifetime value of users” will help set the company apart, Chahal said. While it sounds nice, it will be interesting to see the follow through and if brands really do sign up with gWallet. Chahal said that some of the biggest publishers in the industry came to gWallet and specifically requested the kind of platform that his company is building.
gWallet recently raised $12.5 million and it has 25 employees.