Spending my whole working life in Silicon Valley and watching tech companies grow, I have noticed that there are certain moments in a company’s history that, in an instant, dramatically increase the velocity and trajectory of that company. I believe today is one of those moments for Branch and I am incredibly excited to share it with you.
Today, we’re excited to announce that Branch has acquired TUNE’s Attribution Analytics business. In the coming months, we’ll be integrating the people, expertise, and robust capabilities of TUNE’s offering into Branch’s solutions. The TUNE team essentially invented the concept of mobile measurement in 2011, and have continued to act as industry stewards, establishing best practices and bringing fresh ideas to the mobile market. They have built relationships with many amazing customers over the years, and we’re honored to carry the torch from this day forth.
There are two key elements that we can’t wait to integrate into Branch. First, I’m very excited that the rockstar global team of around 70 people (mostly engineers and account managers) who built and supported TUNE’s Attribution Analytics business will immediately join the Branch team, adding their expertise in mobile marketing and measurement to our bench. Beyond people, this acquisition will supercharge the reporting and segmentation capabilities of Universal Ads, Branch’s advertising attribution platform. Combining TUNE’s capabilities with our unique, cross-platform People-Based Attribution engine will yield the most progressive and advanced measurement platform on the market today.
While Branch and TUNE’s immediate focus will be making this transition happen smoothly over the next couple months, Peter Hamilton (the CEO of TUNE) and I will continue to talk about where we believe this industry will go. We see a future where an entire organization, from product, to data, to marketing will be leveraging Branch to both build contextual user experiences and also connect the dots to see the true cross-platform outcomes of campaigns.
Mobile is definitely the most exciting platform of the hour, but we’re thinking ahead to 5 to 10 years in the future. Already we’re seeing new platforms like AR gaining significant traction, and users are starting to spend substantial time in apps found beyond the phone on smartwatches, televisions, and cars. We also can’t forget the existing touchpoints, such as in-store and desktop. Peter and I have mutually agreed that the linking platform and identity graph Branch has built puts us miles ahead of anyone in the space, ideally positioned to steward the industry into a future where links will be the building blocks that break down the technical barriers between these platforms.
Branch entered the mobile ecosystem from a completely different direction than TUNE and the rest of the measurement companies. As app developers, we were extremely frustrated with how broken and siloed user experiences were across platforms. This led us to build what is considered to be the best mobile linking platform in the world today. Our goal was to make sure that users get a continuous and contextual experience with their previous browsing histories, no matter which platform they use to engage. In order to solve this, we built privacy compliant technology to manage cross-platform user identities, allowing companies to create continuous experiences no matter if the user engaged on desktop, a social platform, via mobile email, on the web or via an app.
Both TUNE and Branch have long believed that user experience and attribution must go hand in hand, because links are the integral system that, if implemented correctly, can solve both use cases. We’ve been close partners since the early days of Branch — we focused on solving the user experience challenges companies face with mobile linking, and then forwarded this attribution data to the best-in-class TUNE dashboard for visualization. Today, we bring the two together in one powerful solution.
If you leverage TUNE for attribution, you might be wondering what this means for you. The most exciting part about this is that we can confidently say the only change the vast majority of you will see is the t-shirt of your account manager. No SDK changes. No link changes. No feature changes. Once the integration is complete, you’ll immediately start to benefit from Branch’s attribution model, where companies report seeing an increase of 30% more attributions than legacy solutions based on basic probabilistic modeling, and have access to web reporting alongside app reporting. In addition to the next-generation attribution engine, you’ll immediately have the opportunity to expand your integration beyond just paid ads, to influencer analytics, social measurement, web-to-app conversion, email and SEO, and much more.
If you’re a Branch customer using or considering using the Universal Ads service, there are lots of exciting updates for you, as well! Branch will be deploying a whole suite of robust analytics and segmentation capabilities over the coming weeks and months. You can expect crucial features such as cohort analysis, cost ingestion / ROI and so much more, spanning web and app using the insights from Branch’s attribution that you depend on to run your business. Additionally, Branch will be incorporating the learnings from TUNE’s many years of fraud detection into our link graph to stop fraudsters in their tracks. Stay tuned over the next few weeks as these features begin to pop up on the Branch dashboard.
Onward!