Voxalyze Will Shutter Alexa User Acquisition Service in Wake of Alexa Quick Links Launch
Alexa skills marketing and analytics company Voxalyze announced it will end its User Acquisition Attribution service after Amazon debuted the new Quick Links feature at the Alexa Live event this week. Quick Links and Voxalyze’s toolkit are both designed to help Alexa skills get discovered. But, as Quick Links comes with all of Amazon’s proprietary data behind it, Voxalyze decided it would be better to shift focus on other projects and will close down User Acquisition Attribution for good on August 31.
Alexa Privilege
Voxalyze began the User Acquisition Attribution service as a way of helping Alexa developers track where people are discovering their voice app as a way of measuring the success of marketing campaigns and refining them to better reach potential users. The point is to collect and use data to streamline and scale efforts to grow the user base for a brand’s Alexa voice apps. Quick Links shares that goal, but directly bonds an Alexa skill to marketing campaigns by allowing developers to embed a link to their Alexa skill in a mobile app, website, digital ad, or social media post. It’s a feature that no third-party developer could provide.
“Life in a startup isn’t always easier, especially if you are dependent on a platform that could crush your product overnight. That is what happened to us and our User Acquisition Analytics offering,” Voxalyze CEO Alexis Hue explained in a blog post and letter about the decision. “Our mission at Voxalyze is to help Alexa developers grow the audience of their skills. We started on our journey by offering you a User Acquisition Attribution solution as we realized this was a critical missing link in promoting Alexa skills. Amazon finally addressing skill discovery is fantastic news for the Alexa developer community. Unfortunately, not so for us: while our solution offers benefits that Amazon doesn’t, we can’t access nor leverage privileged information in the same way. We simply can’t compete. We knew this was a risk from day one, and this won’t stop us on our mission.”
Skill Store Focus
Though Quick Links somewhat supersedes one of Voxalyze’s services, the company is doubling down on ways to measure and improve the performance of voice apps within the Alexa skill store. Instead of connecting the skill to an outside campaign, Voxalyze is building ways to help clients get their skill to the top of search results in the skill store, measuring the keywords used to find it and what changes will boost its profile. Amazon doesn’t have any SEO enhancement features in the skill store, leaving the space wide open for Voxalyze. The company had already been working on its Skill Store Optimization and Skill Store Analytics tools even before the Quick Links announcement and is preparing a beta version for interested clients to test soon. Voxalyze probably won’t be the only company affected by one or more of the 31 new and updated Alexa developer features Amazon showcased at Alexa Live. Owning the platform automatically gives Amazon more scope than any third-party service provider. The shape of the industry will change to fit the new layout, and developers will undoubtedly have to adapt again the next time Amazon expands its proprietary toolkit.
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