Maiden Century: Real-Time Signals for Mobile & Web

Challenge

With almost a decade of experience in the alt-data and technology space, and a proven track record of generating forward-looking insights, Maiden Century helps fundamental and systematic investors understand signals, and harness the power of their data resources.

A long time user of Sensor Tower’s Mobile App Insights, the company was generating meaningful signals for mobile-first companies. However, while their app-based forecasts were key for mobile-first companies, hybrid, or web-dedicated brand models showed a divergence from reported revenue. Without web data, Maiden Century’s analysis was modeling one dimension of consumer activity, leaving significant gaps in their data forecasts.

Solution

The realization - web and mobile were not alternatives, but complimentary data sets. Utilizing Sensor Tower’s Mobile App Performance and Web Insights in backtesting, Maiden Century ran side-by-side comparisons of forecast accuracy – comparing app only, vs. app and web together –and found immediate and material improvement.

In addition, maintaining a consistent, reliable methodology with source data from a single provider eliminated the sourcing, normalization, and reconciliation overhead that was otherwise required to combine data from various providers.

Result

With such volatile macro environments, reliable, high-quality alternative data is at a premium, and has moved from a differentiator to a baseline expectation in institutional investing.

The combination of Sensor Tower’s Web Insights data and Mobile App Insights led to a more complete picture of consumer engagement than any single source approach - especially in cases where the consumer journey runs heavily through a browser. The hotel category, for example, increased forecast accuracy by 10.4%, while retail and airlines averaged 10.1% and 5.7% gains.

Similarly, for brands such as AirBNB and Royal Caribbean, Maiden Century observed that the combination of web and app datasets provided a clearer view of demand, bookings, and growth. In the case of AirBNB, Sensor Tower estimates met 7 out of 7 KPIs, while the combined data for Royal Caribbean showed a 2.7 percentage point accuracy edge over consensus, uncovering critical insight into where, when, and how bookings occur online.

Sensor Tower’s platform has become a primary tool for Maiden Century’s Data Science and Data Strategy teams, eliminating the need for sourcing, normalizing and reconciling multiple data sources, and has freed them up to focus on analysis rather than data operations. And, with a goal to deepen the integration of web traffic data across their coverage universe and additional sectors, Maiden Century is excited for the roadmap of new products and datasets on the horizon.