Case Study: Careem

Careem is the leading app-based car service in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). Careem was cofounded by Mudassir Sheikha and Magnus Olsson, who had both previously worked as management consultants at McKinsey & Company. Careem began in July 2012 as a website-based service for corporate car bookings, and evolved to become a transportation network company with car hire for everyday use. To date, it operates in more than 50 cities in 11 countries across the MENA region and has over 6 million users. Careem’s app eliminates the struggle of finding a cab on the street. With just a few taps within the app passengers are connected with drivers for a fast and safe trip. To date, Careem has raised over $421 million in funding and continues to add exciting services to the app like Careem for Women, Careem for Kids, and monthly bookings, unheard of by other taxi services.

It pays to be first and the founders of Careem identified a huge business opportunity in the Middle East that paid massive dividends for the company. At the beginning, the ride hailing app started offering bookings to corporations via a website, prior to opening it up to customers with a small taxi fleet. This was before the likes of Uber or Lyft launched in the Middle East. By filling this gap in the market, the business quickly grew. Initial funding helped Careem create the app and update it with more features and invest more heavily in marketing.

Rakesh Ramesh, Digital Marketing Director at Careem had a clear objective—for Careem to scale its business. To him, this meant the company needed to heavily invest in marketing their mobile app and to do it effectively, they needed to measure all the marketing campaigns and post install activities. The ultimate objective was to be able to benchmark organic traffic against their paid activity and to create the most efficient media buying strategy to scale the business. Ramesh worked with Adjust at his previous company, so he made sure integrating the Adjust SDK was one of his first moves at his new company.

Careem needed a way to see the entire user journey—through different campaigns, from organic to retargeting, and then back again to organic. By tagging and tracking all its in-app events from install to first ride, Careem synced all the granular event data back to its servers. This allowed Careem to know and understand users and their needs, allowing it to create better products and custom offers.

Christian Eid, VP of Marketing at Careem also started using Adjust’s Fraud Prevention Suite (FPS), which guaranteed that the data analyzed and paid for was clean and trustworthy. By enabling FPS, Careem was protected from the most common types of mobile performance fraud. FPS saved Careem from paying for falsified users and using contaminated data in its analysis. Ultimately, this helps prevent Careem from wasting media budgets on users who would never actually convert.

By leveraging Adjust’s services, Careem was able to prove the success of its mobile marketing activity and scale the business through granular data collection and analysis. By having the full picture, Careem has been able to spend its budget efficiently, and develop and implement successful marketing strategies.