Israel’s Bidalgo, established in 2010 with about $100, 000, is expected to come out of 2015 with $100 million in revenues—but it has succeeded in staying under the radar until it was exposed on Friday, by Globes.
The initial idea came Mor Beeri, a veteran of Matomy Media Group, who was looking for ways to optimize advertising campaigns on Facebook. He enlisted his two friends from his military service and the university, Niv Yemini and Oded Fried. They stayed in a smal Be’er Sheba apartment where they conceived the idea behind Hidalgo.
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Eventually, they added Mor’s brother, Peli Beeri, who worked as senior manager at the online casino 888, to serve as the new company’s CEO.
The idea behind Bidalgo was to borrow from investment banks, pension funds and mutual funds their algotrading—entering trading orders with an algorithm which executes pre-programmed trading instructions for variables like time, price, and volume. Bidalgo applied the same concept to the digital advertising world, using algorithms to optimize the publication and promotion of social networking applications.
“We have created an algorithm that allows easy uploading of campaigns on Facebook to promote applications, and takes into account dozens of parameters and segments: country, age, operating systems of user’s device, to and figure out how and if to address a specific audience, ” says Peleg Israeli, whose been the head of Bidalgo’s Israeli branch when CEO Beeri had to start the company’s Silicon Valley presence.
“The idea is to perpetually monitor supply and demand, ” Israeli continues. “I know how much it costs me to pay for an exposure, or a click, or an app install, and we constantly check the price changes. And just like the stock exchange, I stop a given campaigning once I see it is not economically viable—as someone who sells a stock would do when he sees the stock collapsing.”
It’s all about maximizing the yield from any given campaign.
Cost is not the only component in the Bidalgo system. The campaigns can also follow up and see what users are doing after they had downloaded the application: how many people downloaded, how many purchased something through the app, what is the frequency of use of an application.
“The entire data world is our oyster, ” says Israeli, “We make this information accessible to customers in a very simple manner.”
Bidalgo’s success led Facebook to recognize it as a Facebook Marketing Partner, formerly known as PMD – Preferred Marketing Developers.
“What makes us unique is the fact that almost all the other Facebook partners chose one kind of specialization, ” says Israeli. “They offer either embedded technology, or a service. We manage campaigns for our clients, and if they like it, we can teach them how to use it themselves.”
Bidalgo is still not looking for outside investors, even though they’ve had many offers. They’re determined to keep full ownership as long as they can, and turn to investors only if their plans make it necessary.
When they do their exit, it will be for a figure followed by a lot of zeros.
