Investors: Norwest Venture, General Catalyst, Translink
Singular is a marketing intelligence platform that empowers UA teams through a holistic solution which combines mobile attribution with industry-leading cost aggregation, flexible ROI analytics, and automatic data loading to BI stacks.
Role + Responsibilities
Partnership Strategy
Austen defined team approach with over 1000+ advertising partners by creating prioritized partner segments and differentiated value props (ex: MMPs, ad networks, agencies, affiliates, etc.).
Scalable Processes
As Singular’s first Partnerships hire, he established workflows that built strong operational foundations and helped manage team expansion from 1 to 10 internationally.
Product Stickiness
He improved retention + engagement rates by building compelling cases for improved integrations + ETL processes that addressed next-gen ROI analysis (ex: cross-device / multi-touch tracking).
Technical Scoping
Austen and the team were responsible for leading conversations with partners, developing scoping plans, and project managing between international business units and Israel-based dev teams.
Work Sample - Apsalar Acquisition
Singular’s initial offering was focused on aggregating UA spend across advertising platforms as this data was not readily available within postbacks. However, as mobile marketing strategies evolved over time, advertisers became more focused on ROI-based insights which helped them improve the customer lifecycle.
To address this need, Singular acquired an attribution company (called Apsalar) in order to connect their cost aggregation data to Apsalar’s post-install events, which enabled full-funnel marketing analysis for brands like Target and Walmart. Austen led the Partnerships team through this period of transition by redefining goals, processes, and collateral in ways that aligned to newly surfaced partner and customer-specific value.
Challenges
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Process Overhaul
Supporting attribution introduced significantly longer partner integration and update times due to the mapping needed between reporting endpoints and tracking URLs. This initially inhibited customers from seeing ROI granularity and resulted in slower adoption rates of Singular’s attribution solution.
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Customer Auditing
Singular released their own attribution product and wanted to target customers who would benefit from a unified offering. However, this would require auditing customer configurations on an individual basis to scope value generated and justify costs incurred by switching tracking providers.
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Reactive Communication
Early on, the Business Development team had issues supporting over 1000+ advertising channels due to time and staffing constraints. This often meant that integration updates were often identified after a customer started experiencing issues with their Singular reporting dashboards.
Approach
Transition Partner Strategy
Singular’s new product offering required a major shift in partner strategy (“depth vs breadth”) given customer value was now tied to ROI analysis as opposed to cost aggregation. Austen led restructuring of team operations by redefining partner-specific value props and collateral. He also reprioritized engagement based on customer-aligned objectives (ex: data granularity, flexibility, etc.) and developed partner-specific insights that ultimately resulted in Singular’s first ROI Index.
Create Additive Value
Austen created an Excel report that used a combination of vlookup and regex formulas to identify parameter and macro gaps within existing tracking links. This was used by Singular’s Business teams to proactively help resolve gaps in existing tracking configuration.
This empowered customers to receive even more data granularity than previously experienced and enabled them to see immediate value after onboarding or switching attribution providers.
Advocate for Partner-Specific Resources
After building new ETL processes to improve data granularity, Singular focused on driving ad spend to profitable advertising platforms with quality users in terms of engagement and LTV. Austen worked with executive leadership, product, and engineering teams to create a partner portal that enabled ad platforms to push integration updates proactively.
By building a customized partner portal, implementing a referral payments system, and incorporating successful co-marketing (ex: dedicated partner page), the team was able to create a partner program that drove additional revenue to preferred partners while also providing clients with more granular data and tracking.
Results
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2x Conversion Rates
Average increase in customer conversion rates when transitioning to Singular’s product suite.
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80% Link Improvement Rate
Empowered customers to receive even more granular post-install data than previously experienced.
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30% Lift in Data Quality
Driven by ETL process improvements (API, S3, GCP, etc.) and new data enrichment methods.