Ewan Darby, managing director EMEA at Cake, discusses one of the biggest topics from conversations with clients: real-time data.

Midway through 2016 and weve seen two of the biggest events in mobile marketing: Mobile World Congress and, earlier this month, the Israel Mobile Summit.

Attending trade shows is vital for any business with opportunities to sell to new clients, connect with existing ones, learn from the industry and provide thought leadership with innovations and developments. Both shows have proven extremely positive on all fronts – winning new business, engagement with our clients, listening and learning about the major topics for mobile this year and next, and providing thought leadership. As mobile has rapidly become the dominant vertical for Cake, we’ve been listening carefully to the market to understand needs and where to focus our development attention.

The conversations we’re having with clients and prospective clients in mobile right now are around real-time data and the opportunities that can be realised by marketers with access to complex information. Just from our own platform, there is an embarrassment of riches for the mobile marketer with 13 parameters captured, offering billions of algorithmic outcomes – way more than can possibly be used. But it is this plethora of data that means mobile traffic may be optimised in ever increasingly diverse ways.

Just as app developers discovered the opportunities for developing products utilising multiple phone functions (location, camera, device type and so forth) so too are marketers realising the opportunity to integrate complex data. In-app activity tells only part of the story, and we are increasingly being asked how we can support clients to improve the pre-app process.

Earlier this month, Cake released an important update in deferred deep-linking. When enabled, this feature provides the ability to direct a user to a specific view within a mobile app after downloading the app from the App Store.

A typical user journey for a customer clicking on a mobile app offer may be: The user clicks on an offer link from their phone. If they don’t have the app already, they are redirected to the App Store for download. Once the app is downloaded and opened, the customer will search for the product that initially peaked their interest.

This type of user experience results in the possibility of losing the customer’s interest, and in turn the loss of a conversion. With deferred deep-linking enabled, the customer will immediately be redirected to the product that resulted in the app download; thus resulting in a higher conversion rate. This feature can be used to pass on voucher codes or to provide a user with in-game money, or promotions.

With most recent estimates showing that mobile will account for 50 per cent of all digital ad spend in 2016 – worth around $100bn – listening to clients and delivering business critical upgrades has never been more important.

This sponsored article was written by Ewan Darby, managing director EMEA at Cake, and is editorially independent from Mobile Marketing Magazine