Tencent Doubles Down On Advertising Business With AppsFlyer Partnership

Chinese tech giant Tencent is making good on its word to boost its advertising business and offer advertisers more refined targeting tools.

On Wednesday, Tencent and AppsFlyer, a mobile marketing analytics and attribution platform, jointly announced a strategic partnership that would let app marketers outside of China access real-time analytics to Tencent Social Ads for the first time ever.

“In today’s increasingly competitive landscape, app marketers need deep insights about the performance of their install campaigns more than ever,” said Canny Lau, Product Manager at Tencent Social Ads, in a press release.

“The insights our advertisers will get from AppsFlyer are invaluable in helping them maximize the return on their app install ad spend.”

Tencent Social Ads lets advertisers run campaigns on some of the company’s largest social platforms, including messaging apps WeChat and QQ, which have about 800 million and 899 million monthly active users, respectively. AppsFlyer’s service will let advertisers around the world track key campaign metrics on Tencent Social Ads, including clicks, activations, in-app purchases, sessions, and average revenue per user.

Tencent Social Ads advertisers will also be able to leverage AppsFlyer analytics, such as cohort analysis and full funnel reporting, to analyze the performance of app install campaigns.

“The app economy is quickly becoming a global economy, and this partnership with Tencent Social Ads, one of the biggest and most important distribution platforms in the world, opens up myriad possibilities for app marketers and developers looking to grow in China, while enabling us to expand our footprint in Asia and globally as well,” said Elad Masiach, VP Partner Development at AppsFlyer.

According to Tencent’s second quarter financial report, only 18% of Tencent’s revenue comes from advertising. However, the Chinese tech giant is moving quickly to capture more market share in the advertising industry. Revenue from advertising increased 73% year over year during the first quarter of 2016 with approximately 80% generated through Tencent’s mobile platforms.

Last January, Tencent started displaying ads in users’ Moments, the timeline feature of WeChat. Since then, the tech company has made more ad formats available to advertisers, including video.

In August 2015, Tencent opened WeChat Moments ads to all advertisers, expanding on big name brands, such as Coca Cola and Mercedes-Benz.