What has Adpushup done to stack the odds in the favour of growth? In this post, we’ll look at what our team did early on to set the stage for success.

Recently, we found ourselves included on the Financial Times list of The Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies 2021.

The recognition comes on the heels of AdPushup’s recent accomplishments as a ‘Google Certified Publishing Partner in 2020’ and finalist of the Microsoft partner of the year award in 2020 .

FT’s list follows a strict criteria to identify the fastest growing companies, only entities with a revenue of at least $100,000 in 2016 and at least $1.5m in 2019 were considered.

The ranking highlights top businesses across the Americas’ for whom creativity and innovation have paid off, and the organisations that survived the coronavirus pandemic.  

“We are delighted to receive this recognition as The Americas’ 19th fastest growing company, which underscores how quickly the web publishing and media industry is embracing our ad revenue optimization platform. Most of our customers see an immediate top line growth from our solution, which is why word of mouth has been one of the strongest channels for our growth. While the report covers data till 2019, we were able to sustain high growth rates in 2020 too, firmly supported by our new product releases and team expansion. It’s still day one for us and we have a very positive outlook to continue our three digit growth rates in 2021 as well.”

Ankit Oberoi, Founder & CEO, AdPushup

AdPushup Overview 

Back in 2014, very few organisations were tackling the issue of revenue optimisation for publishers. AP began with a hypothesis that A/B testing can be used for optimising ad layouts – but publishers had no tool for that. So, we found an opportunity right there – solving user’s pain points with our very first offering. 

What no one knew yet was that AP’s timing was perfect. We managed to build an elegant, intuitive, and publisher-friendly application by nailing a few core features to near perfection and working to be great rather than good. 

Though we officially launched our first prototype only six years ago, our products have seen truly remarkable growth since then. 

“As a revenue optimisation platform, AdPushup is positioned towards the supply-side, offering a unique solution for publishers that sits as an optimisation layer between their website and the ad network/exchanges they work with.”

– Ankit Oberoi, CEO at AdPushup

Today, AdPushup is working with 300-plus web publishers globally and most of them are based in the US, Europe, and India, including websites like Reddit, CNET, GSMArena, Times Internet, NDTV, and Network 18. 

AdPushup by numbers: 

AdPushup’s impressive growth has understandably garnered plenty of attention from investors and customers:

• Founder, Ankit Oberoi and his early team invested around $7,000 into the business 

• In 2014, the startup raised a seed round of $630,000 from over 50 angles. 

• In 2016, AdPushup notched up an undisclosed Series A investment at a valuation $15 Mn, led by Japanese ad tech company Geniee, Inc. 

• Between 2016 and 2019, we recorded an approximate 2500% growth in revenue, establishing an annual revenue run rate of $10 million. 

• In 2020, AP added 60+ enterprise clients while increasing the active client base by almost 150%.

• Currently, we serve and optimize over 100 billion ad impressions (annually) for the 300+ publishing partners in our network.

Product Development in 2020 & 2021 

Since inception, AP’s product offerings have undergone a phenomenal growth. We had a laser-like focus on making our products more robust and user-friendly. Here are some of the recent product achievements:

• Multi-format Ads: AdPushup now supports multi-format ads via our Prebid setup. With this feature, our publishers were able to view a revenue uplift of approximately 5-10%.

• Client-side header bidding for AMP: AP recently released client-side header bidding for AMP and moved away from background refresh. As a result, one of our customers saw an uplift of ~40% in the eCPMs and the number of header bidding impressions increased around 10x ( eCPM from HB is at around 3.5x that of AdX).

• HB Auction Optimizer: Recently, our product team built an auction optimizer that allows for granular control over the entire header bidding auction via the creation of Zapier/ IFTTT type rules from the AdPushup panel. 

• HB Analytics: We developed an analytics suite that captures billions of data points to present reports across 11 different metrics and 8 types of charting representations, including bid landscape data. 

• Rewarded Video Ads: Rewarded ads are a tried and tested ad format used for in-app monetization. With Google rolling out support for such ads on the mobile web, we’ve incorporated the format in our product suite.

• Plug and Play Refresh: We developed a technology through which Ad refresh can plug into any header bidding wrapper. 

3 Strategies that supported AdPushup’s exponential growth:

So, what has AdPushup done to stack the odds in the favor of growth? In this section, we’ll look at what our team did early on to set the stage for success:

1. Developing great product and testing it over and over again 

Our team developed a great product six years ago but we never stopped refining it. After many months of aggressive testing and continually improving our offerings, we realised it’s not all about introducing a product, but also about empowering the users. Hence, we spent months perfecting the user experience, paying special attention to the user’s emotional journey. No shortcuts! 

AP’s first product was an automated A/B testing tool and visual ad editor. The automated A/B testing tool uses the multi-armed bandit algorithms for identifying ad placements, colors, and sizes that were performing best. The visual ad editor helps publishers visually create and edit ad variants and layouts, without any coding knowledge. 

2. Teaching users why they need our product 

As a startup, the biggest challenge was learning how to sell our products to publishers. To tackle this problem, we started teaching users why they need our product – focusing on all their pain points. Through blogs, webinars, case studies, product reviews, and extensive content resources, we kept educating our target customers about the use cases of all our products.

3. Feedback is part of AdPushup’s DNA 

6 years after the launch, feedback remains the DNA of our company’s structure. Whenever our users complained about a feature or told us about something that wasn’t helping them, we fixed it – immediately. Pretty early on, our team combined customer support and quality assurance to ensure swift action on any user issues.  

At AdPushup, we focus on building long-time relationships with our clients – not only to provide them great service throughout the year, but also to learn more about our products through them. Our team keeps track of how many users are asking for a new feature and what they’re saying about the product. 

The big lesson here:

Whatever you name your first product, however you operate and announce it, and whenever you decide to scale it – make sure you wring every bit of feedback throughout the process. AdPushup made the most of this phase by focusing on what users were saying and how the product can be improved to meet their needs. 

You might also like:

• 2020 Year-in-Review: AdPushup Growth, Product Updates [+Ad Tech Developments]
• AdPushup Becomes an Official AMP-approved Real-Time Config Vendor
• How AdPushup Helped CCNA7 Grow its Ad Revenue by 534% (Case Study)

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