Israeli navigational app Waze is one of Israel's most popular applications. It regularly appears at the top of the download tables for Android and iOS devices, and has become, at least for drivers, one of the essential apps to be installed on a smartphone.
Despite its popularity, and the high price tag for the company when it was acquired two years ago for $1 billion by Google, as reported exclusively at the time by "Globes," the numbers behind Waze have never before been disclosed.
How popular is Waze? According to information obtained by "Globes," 2.9 million Israelis use the app each month, and 850,000 use it daily. For the sake of comparison, Facebook, another app that is popular in Israel, has 3.5 million active mobile users a month, and 2.6 million active users daily. At the same time, the comparison distorts the target audience somewhat. Waze's users are drivers, while anyone over 13 is eligible to use Facebook.
Waze's figure also show that Israeli drivers use the navigational app eight hours a month, and open the app an average of 17 times a month.
Information obtained by "Globes" also discloses for the first time the prices charged by Google through Waze for advertising on the app. The advertising tools on the app are of two kinds. The first one, which is older, consists of branded pins indicating the location of highlighted items, such as Super Pharm or a restaurant, on Waze's navigational map.
This tool is being offered to advertisers and brands simultaneously with a branded search that highlights the location and logo above the search results. Waze charges NIS 1 per thousand exposures for this tool, with the minimum advertising budget being NIS 10,000 for a minimum of three months.
Waze's better known tool is called Take Over. Frequent users of this app recognize it from the moving advertisements in the upper part of the screen every time they stop at an intersection. This tool combines movement and action, and enables advertisers to include a communication button for their business, navigate to its address, maintain location or coupons, etc.
It is possible to be skeptical of the effectiveness of this advertising tool - both because drivers do not necessarily look at it on the screen when they are waiting at a traffic light, and because being urged to do something is not really attractive when the app offers people traveling to a meeting chicken for NIS 9.90 a kilo at a supermarket if they deviate from their route for a few minutes.
Waze still regards these tools as advanced advertising tools, whose main advantage is the ability to target and focus the ads on the basis of the user's location, which makes it more relevant.
According to the information obtained by "Globes," Waze charges NIS 20-25 for a thousand exposures for Take Over advertising. The Reach Take Over premium tool, costing NIS 40 per thousand exposures and a NIS 40,000 minimum advertising budget, enables the advertiser to design by himself how the advertisement will appear, instead of using the company's regular format.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 11, 2015
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