Vungle Acquires AlgoLift to Optimize Its Mobile Advertising Capabilities

According to a statement, AlgoLift’s performance optimization capabilities will allegedly boost Vungle’s ability to give advertisers actionable intelligence, providing them with contextual anonymized data and algorithmic-powered recommendations to scale user acquisition spend, buy against downstream metrics and increase ROAS by up to 150%.

“The combined offering will enable Vungle to deliver machine advanced automation technology and contextual-level targeting recommendations to help global advertisers scale campaigns, improve real-time optimization and streamline workload,” said Martin Price, vp of product at Vungle, in a statement. “We are looking forward to integrating AlgoLift’s technology into our products to offer clients an automated, privacy-centric solution to buy against metrics such as ROAS.” 

The purchase of the predictive lifetime value (LTV) modeling and marketing automation company is one of several in recent weeks after a pause in dealmaking as the coronavirus took hold—though sources in the space predict a flurry of activity in Q4.

It also takes place as the industry gears up for Apple’s full rollout of iOS 14 and its effective withdrawal of its IDFA (identifier for advertisers), the historic default means for app developers to track and trace the effectiveness on ads on iOS. Although Apple has extended a stay of execution into early next year, the move has rocked the mobile advertising industry since plans of the development were first revealed in June of last year—and may prove to be a serious challenge some of the largest names in the industry, including Facebook.

According to Seufert, AlgoLift was tapped because it was poised to be one of the company’s best-equipped to handle the industry shift away from IDFA toward privacy-friendly ways to target and optimize ad campaigns.

“By acquiring AlgoLift, Vungle is empowering itself to thrive in the new non-deterministic, privacy-centric advertising environment,” said Eric Seufert, media strategist and founder of the trade blog MobileDevMemo, in a statement. “Equipped with AlgoLift’s impressive measurement models and probabilistic attribution methodologies, Vungle will be well positioned as the mobile advertising industry undertakes this privacy-centric evolution.” 

AlgoLift’s entire team—including co-founders Andre Tutundjian and Dmitry Yudovsky—will join the Vungle organization, but will continue to operate out of its offices in Los Angeles.