Last month, Sometrics announced the creation of the Virtual Currency Manager, an app designed to help developers of ad-supported apps that feature virtual currency monetize their platform more efficiently. The Virtual Currency Manager acts as an adservers for in-game, ad-based offers supplied by networks like Offerpal and TrialPay.
These offers usually reward a user for clicking on an ad or signing up for a service with a certain amount of in-game virtual currency. Using the Virtual Currency Manager, an app developer can work with any number of ad-based offer networks and use provided analytic tools to gauge which offers are most successful at attracting click-through from users.
The Virtual Currency Manager is the first program of its kind, says Swanson, with respect to advertising in applications driven by virtual currency. It is compatible with any sort of application that supports virtual currency transactions and hosts in-game ad offers, including games, social network apps, virtual worlds, and MMORPGs.
"We do Offerpal and currency rewards through ad networks, and we don’t see another solution on the network that lets you manage these offers like an ad server. So, we’ve built the first," says Swanson. "I see the industry having many more players like Offerpal, and we want to be the company that lets you optimize those different relationships."
Sometrics says the Virtual Currency Manager can help maximize revenue provided by the virtual goods stream.
"One of the things we’re staring to notice in our clients, is that when they only make, say, 20% of their revenue through virtual currency, we’re integrating offers in a much different way, and we can lift that percentage much higher. If you haven’t figured out how to integrate with Offerpal or how to best sell virtual currency, we can help put those ads where they’ll matter," says Swanson.
A case study Sometrics provided for example involved one of their clients, a Facebook RPG developer who has not consented to have its name released to the press at this time. Sometrics claims that by analyizing stats on the Sometrics interface, the developer noticed that one of their providers generated more revenue per user in the UK than others. The developer adjusted the way provider ads were displaying to UK users via Sometrics, to funnel more traffic to the most efficient provider for that region. Sometrics claims this resulted in a 50% increase in revenue for this particular developer.
The Virtual Currency Manager is intended as an open network, compatible with any provider or with ad offers developed by an app's in-house advertising team. Tools included in the app allow developers to upload and customize their own ad offers based on their own relationships with advertising partners.
"If you’re a game publisher, and you have some of your own ad relationships, you can sign up your own advertisers, and you can choose to associate so much currency with that advertiser. Then our system targets users based on demographic data, and it’s very simple. It’s almost like adding a banner to a traditional ad server," says Swanson. "Instead they add the advertisement, and tie the desired virtual currency value, and then determine who's going to be the target group for that offer."
Demographics analysis is very important to how the Virtual Currency Manager works, in part because the application grew out of Sometrics' background in developing data analysis tools. The company's first offering was its Social Analytics product, which game developers could insert into an application to gather demographic data automatically. Social Analytics is currently operating in about about 70% of all active Facebook applications, according to Sometrics.
"Where we evolved, is that we always planned on launching an ad server for banner ads called Ad Manager, for targeting these kinds of interactions. We realized a lot of apps are making money on sales of virtual currency. So we decided to make a solution that would coordinate offers through Offerpal and TrialPay," says Swanson.
In the month since the Virtual Currency Manager's launch, Sometrics has signed 20 different publishers as clients for the system. Among these clients, whose identities cannot be released to the press at this time, are a small social gaming compay that serves 250,000 unique users per month, and a social network that serves millions of unique users per month. Right now Sometrics hopes to expand the Virtual Currency Manager to more clients.
Sometrics is also already at work on an enhanced version of the Virtual Currency Model that will be more flexible, transparent, and easy-to-use than the current model, which can already be completely installed in thirty minutes. Sometrics hopes to make the upgraded version of Virtual Currency Manager available in early February.
"From our perspective, we chose a space in the English-speaking worlds that last year was phenomenal in terms of growth. We’re really offering the first solution that allows anyone using virtual currency to optimize the relationships that they have," says Swanson. "There’s no reason why you have to work with only one offer network. You can work with multiple providers and make sure you get the most revenue per user possible."
Sometrics is currently offering the Virtual Currency Manager for free to clients. The company expects to make money off of it by adding unique offers and ads to a opt-in, client-only ad stream. Then Sometrics gets a cut of the revenues generated by the unique ad offers available only through their platform's system.
Swanson says that using the Virtual Currency Manager has no cost to a client, as Sometrics provides full customer support for free for all clients. According to Sometrics, the program can be up and running in as little as 30 minutes. Presumably client developers would need to spend some time to train staff in using the program, however, if they wanted to gain the most benefit from its analysis and optimization tools.
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