It’s a mobile world, and making money from users on the go is the question that Yahoo needs to answer and that Facebook already has. For companies in between, it’s a tough race between deciding how to price their offerings and how best to monetize their disparate user bases. As TechCrunch has reported previously, Swrve, a San Francisco and Dublin-based firm, is focused on helping companies work to answer those questions.
Today Swrve added dynamic engagement scoring to its toolset, improving its extant A/B testing offerings to better help application developers dig into their usage data and improve their apps to better fit their user bases.
I dropped by Swrve’s offices to chat with its CEO, Hugh Reynolds, about the release. Walking through the user flow, the addition makes sense: The more you can test, and the more granularly, the better choices you can make in terms of pricing and design.
More broadly, Swrve helps developers segment their user bases, offering deals and messages and discounts and like items to certain subsets thereof. So, if you want to, say, offer a coupon to your users who roller skate and have never spent a dime in your application, you can do that at 4:30 p.m. today.
Offering discounts is only one potential way to boost your mobile ROI naturally. You also want to dig through the further reaching impacts of a decision. Essentially, engagement testing lets Swrve users test more deeply, for instance tracking the revenue of four different application variants, and calculate which application decision has the highest percent chance of driving revenue.
If you’re into numbers and charts, Swrve puts on a show, showing the percent likelihood of app changes having the highest impact over time. The gist here is that Swrve wants to make app design decisions less black magic and more measurable events.
The company has to perform, given that it charges clients between $3,000 and $15,000 a month for its service. Swrve has 40 employees, and most recently raised $6.25 million in external funding. Intel Capital participated in that round, which is unsurprising given its parent company’s long-term relationship with Reynolds.
If Swrve can help its customers improve their mobile ROI, it has a product worth its salt. What’s not up for question is that making money off of mobile users is something that every content and service provider needs to conquer. Recall the story about who made more money, miners or those who sold them shovels?
Top Image Credit: Flickr
