The Challenge
A competitive intelligence platform provider for the ad tech industry required a contextual categorization engine capable of yielding a wide variety of data sets including language, categories, ad fraud and malicious detection and more to enrich their platform offering. The ad tech platform provider’s objective was to improve performance of its customers’ online campaigns through enhanced ad targeting and reduction in ads placed on fraudulent sites.
Profile
Ad Tech Competitive Intelligence Platform Provider (Ad Tech Platform Provider)
Industry
Ad Tech
Deployment Requirement
The Ad Tech Platform Provider required a simple, easy integration using Python on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit servers within their data centers and the ability to scale to billions of transactions and impressions a day, as well as support for the Tier 2 category set defined in the IAB® Quality Assurance Guidelines.
The Problem
The Ad Tech Platform Provider needed to enhance the depth and coverage of its business intelligence offering by extracting as much information as possible from web pages being used for online advertising by some of its customers’ most popular brands.
“We were already collecting data from our own proprietary data mining technologies, yet we realized that the context of web pages used for advertising could always be more insightful to our platform subscribers.”
-CEO, Ad Tech Platform Provider
The Ad Tech Platform Provider identified strict requirements in a technology partner and following is how zvelo contextual categorization solutions met or exceeded expectations of each one:
| Ad Tech Platform Provider Requirements | zvelo Solutions |
|---|---|
| Credibility – a vendor with a proven track record of working with notable worldwide technology companies in the ad tech industry. | Recognized Technology Partner – zvelo partners with some of the most well-known ad targeting attribution, ad networks, ad exchanges, and DSPs, in addition to big data analytics firms. zvelo processes billions of contextual data set queries daily. Furthermore, zvelo continues to grow, which helps to expand the depth of ActiveWeb* coverage for all partners. |
| Language Detection – a solution that can process and generate comprehensive categorization data sets for URLs and unstructured data for the most popular languages. | Broad Language Support – the zvelo proprietary contextual categorization systems are able to generate a wide range of extensive and granular data sets across more than a dozen languages for web pages (view the official Language Support Map). |
| Competitive Intelligence Enrichment – a solution that provides meaningful data that could enrich and help differentiate and further monetize the competitive intelligence platform offering. | Comprehensive data set support – in addition to the nearly 500 categories used for classifying web pages, the zvelo systems also process and generate Language and Reputation, allowing for significant data enrichment opportunities. Furthermore, zvelo categories can be mapped to industry standards such as the IAB Tier 2, other existing category sets or even custom category sets as required, allowing for easy integration with existing platform offerings. |
| Brand Safety – a solution that provides detections for objectionable and sensitive content, as well as phishing and malicious URLs. | Objectionable, Malicious and Phishing Detection – zvelo has been a longtime leader in malicious and phishing detection, as well as the detection for objectionable or sensitive content including porn, terrorism, hate speech, etc. zvelo utilizes a combination of proprietary technologies and proven third party tools to provide real-time detection malicious variants, threats and non brand-safe sites. |
| High Volume Support & Scalability– a solution that can scale up to support increases from hundreds of millions of queries and impressions a day to the billions a day that are anticipated in the near future. | Performance – the easy to integrate SDK/API from zvelo also provides the best scalability in the industry, supporting customers doing tens of billions of queries daily. |
The Evaluation
The Ad Tech Platform Provider conducted a preliminary evaluation of the zvelo contextual categorization engine using zveloDB with a special focus on full path URLs utilizing actual news stories, as well as unstructured content from blog posts and comments pulled directly from their business intelligence platform, plus social media feeds integrated into these web pages.
“The evaluation was conducted without a hitch. We were very impressed by the web page categorization speed and accuracy and by the vast amount of data sets their engine provided.”
– CTO, Ad Tech Platform Provider
The Results
After integrating the zvelo contextual categorization engine, the Ad Tech Platform Provider was able to significantly enrich the level of insight and analytics regarding web pages used for online advertising, whether textual, display or native in nature. The additional data sets helped to differentiate their competitive intelligence platform and increased the ability to report on various web page information including language and also detect objectionable pages, which further increased customer satisfaction and ROI on ad campaigns. Finally, the enhanced reporting and visualization of web page data spawned a new wave of freemium to premium reporting and visualization plans, which helped expand their overall subscriber base and bottom line.
“Online advertising is an extremely congested landscape and we are in the business of alleviating the ad buying decision-making process by reporting on where top advertisers place ads and which publisher websites provide the best ROI. zvelo has truly helped make us a market leader in this arena.”
– CEO, Ad Tech Platform Provider
*ActiveWeb – those websites visited by actual users.
