Re/code jour­nal­ist Ina Fried has revealed that New York’s mobile tech start­up Tap­Com­merce has just been acquired by Twitter.

Found­ed in 2012, Tap­Com­merce rapid­ly estab­lished itself as a leader in mobile ad retar­get­ing. As any prod­uct man­ag­er famil­iar with the process could tes­ti­fy, while it’s rel­a­tive­ly straight­for­ward on desk­top devices to help busi­ness­es tar­get ads based on a user’s pre­vi­ous activ­i­ty, the absence of cook­ies on mobile demands an alto­geth­er new approach.

Desir­able technology

That’s where Tap­Com­merce stepped in: accord­ing to its CEO and co-founder, Bri­an Long, it was able to retar­get ads on mobile devices by using “large amounts of data cou­pled with sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis.” An ecom­merce app, for instance, could be fed with retar­get­ed ads by Tap­Com­merce to encour­age lapsed cus­tomers to come back by tempt­ing them with new sales or promotions.

The new deal with Twit­ter is said to be worth $100 mil­lion, although the microblog­ging jug­ger­naut has so far declined to con­firm the price tag. But if that’s an accu­rate ball park fig­ure, you don’t need to be a sea­soned prod­uct man­ag­er to fig­ure out that TapCommerce’s plat­form was being eyed hun­gri­ly by the social net­work­ing giant, which has just announced new mobile app install and engage­ment ads. The startup’s tech­nol­o­gy is like­ly to be of con­sid­er­able assis­tance to these projects.

The deal clinchers

In a blog arti­cle, Twitter’s VP of Glob­al Online Sales, Richard Alfon­si, wrote that with the Tap­Com­merce team now on board, “Twit­ter will be able to offer mobile app mar­keters more robust capa­bil­i­ties for app re-engage­ment, tools and man­aged ser­vice solu­tions for real-time pro­gram­mat­ic buy­ing, and bet­ter mea­sure­ment capa­bil­i­ties. Com­bined with our oth­er ad solu­tions, adver­tis­ers will be able to dri­ve con­ver­sions and ROI with mobile con­sumers on and off of Twit­ter, across the full user life­cy­cle — from acquir­ing new users through app installs, to engag­ing exist­ing users who already have the adver­tis­ers’ apps on their device.”

Every­day mobile users, he added, can now expect to find bet­ter and more rel­e­vant ads appear­ing in their apps.

The enquir­ing prod­uct man­ag­er may be inter­est­ed in what exact­ly made Tap­Com­merce such an attrac­tive option for Twit­ter. Alfon­si told TechCrunch jour­nal­ist Antho­ny Ha that the startup’s sup­port for pro­gram­mat­ic ad buy­ing, cou­pled with its app reen­gage­ment and its client list (which over­laps con­sid­er­ably with Twitter’s) were the deal clinchers.