Discovery and user acquisition are the key challenges in the mobile gaming market, and as a result mobile ad networks have grown in response. There are now well over a hundred different mobile ad networks, and game marketers are facing increasing difficulty in tracking and optimizing campaigns across so many networks. Enter Grow Mobile with its solution: A mobile app marketing platform that enables marketers to buy across more than 75 mobile advertising networks.

The Grow Mobile Platform is the first self-serve dashboard allowing marketers “to transparently buy, track, optimize and scale their advertising campaigns across the highly complex and fragmented mobile advertising marketplace,” as the company’s press release puts it. “By utilizing Grow Mobile’s Platform, marketers can now make more informed advertising decisions and increase their overall return on investment with one solution.”

Creating the app was a response to the situation that COO A.J. Yeakal and CEO Brendan Lyall, co-founders along with chief architect Minglei Xu, saw in the marketplace. The [a]list daily spoke exclusively with Grow Mobile about the app.

“There are so many different players in the market that we wanted to build a solution that would help with buying,” said CEO Brendan Lyall. More than that, they wanted an app “that would help with analyzing and tracking your data, creating a better situation to optimize the advertising spend.”

“There are well over 150 ad networks today,” Lyall noted. “It’s become increasingly fragmented, and it’s difficult for a user acquisition manager or a game studio to create enough coverage to test out all these different ad channels. It’s not as easy to decipher which one is the right network. Everyone wants to test, but it’s just very difficult to do technical integration and billing with all 60 of them or however many providers or ad networks you might work with.”

What’s the response been from ad networks?

“They’ve been very positive, actually,” said Lyall. “The core of our service is to not only scale our customers, but when you map the right campaigns to the right networks it nets out to better results on the ad network side. They’re very supportive of what we’re doing.”

Grow Mobile is focusing on larger developers as its target market.

“We focused on building a platform that appeals to tier 1 mobile app developers, which means that our average customer is spending a minimum of $20,000 a month,” said Lyall. “We find that’s an amount that gives an advertiser enough budget to really test out enough traffic sources to validate what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, and figure out which sources are going to scale best for their app.”

Grow Mobile’s proprietary Intelligence Directory and automated Media Planner give marketers the information they need to select the most effective traffic sources from more than 75 integrated ad networks, ad exchanges and direct publishers. The platform’s self-serve media-buying wizard makes it easy for users to syndicate campaigns live in minutes, without human interaction or signing multiple insertion orders. Grow Mobile’s lightweight SDK and API integration are available for Android and iOS and are available now at the company’s web site.