Learn more about the
SITO Mobile project
A Mobile DSP Helping Brands Reach Their Audiences via Location-Based Technology
This is the story of how SITO Mobile, a publicly traded DSP vendor, partnered with Clearcode to gain access to more inventory, optimize the infrastructure to increase the number of impressions served daily, and reduce discrepancies between the DSP’s partners.
Continue reading our SITO Mobile case study and find out what challenges we faced, how we solved them, and the results they produced.
CLIENT
Tech company
INDUSTRY
Programmatic advertising
SERVICE
AdTech
COUNTRY
USA
About SITO Mobile
SITO Mobile is a US-based AdTech company that allows advertisers and ad agencies to run location-targeted mobile ad campaigns via its proprietary demand-side platform (DSP).
Prior to its partnership with Clearcode, SITO Mobile had extensive business experience in the advertising industry, but was looking at expanding its operations into the online world. However, it lacked a team experienced in developing advertising technology.
In late 2013, SITO Mobile approached Clearcode and asked us to help solve a number of technical and business challenges.
Key points
Product
SITO Mobile partnered with Clearcode to build and expand its mobile demand-side platform (DSP).
Project goal
The goal of the project was to gain access to more inventory, optimize the infrastructure to increase the number of impressions served daily, and reduce discrepancies between the DSP’s partners.
What we did
We deployed a number of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve the stability of the DSP, perform frequency capping, and reduce the time it took to produce reports.
Result
SITO Mobile’s DSP is able to receive up to 260,000 bid requests per second – aka queries per second (QPS).
The Goal
The goal of the project was to gain access to more inventory, optimize the infrastructure to increase the number of impressions served daily, and reduce discrepancies between the DSP’s partners
Main challenges
Challenge #1
Gain access to more inventory to help SITO Mobile’s advertisers expand the reach and performance of its online media campaigns.
Solution
We integrated the SITO Mobile DSP with various ad exchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs).
Result
The DSP now integrates with over five ad exchanges/SSPs and can serve over 40 million impressions per day.
Challenge #2
Optimize the infrastructure to:
- Increase the number of bid requests the DSP’s bidder can handle per second.
- Reduce manual tasks such as managing multiple databases and performing regular backups.
- Make it easier to add and remove instances based on demand and business objectives.
- Conduct accurate frequency capping to reduce ad waste, improve campaign performance, and optimize media spend.
- Generate final reports based on tracked events in an efficient and timely manner.
- Improve campaign reporting by including multidimensional data.
Solution
To overcome the infrastructure challenges, we deployed a variety of Amazon Web Services (AWS), including:
Challenge #3
Reduce impression and media-cost discrepancies between the DSP and ad exchanges/SSPs.
Solution
Our development team worked directly with the various ad exchanges and SSPs to build custom reporting mechanisms.
Result
Prior to cooperating with ad exchanges and SSPs, the discrepancies between the number of impressions and their price was close to 50%.
After working with the SITO Mobile’s various partners to build these custom mechanisms, we reduced the discrepancies to around 1%.
This reduction in discrepancies has allowed SITO Mobile to improve its media spend, which has had a direct and positive impact on its bottom line.
Challenge #4
Improve the stability of the platform, maintain uptime, monitor the platform for performance issues, and react to incidents in a timely manner.
Solution
To ensure the platform was under constant monitoring, we provided SITO Mobile with 24/7 monitoring and a service-level agreement (SLA).
Result
Our development team is able to react to performance issues immediately, avoid potential problems well in advance, and improve the overall stability of the platform by making regular infrastructure optimizations.
Key features
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Bid requests
The DSP is able to receive 260,000 queries per second (QPS)—i.e. bid requests.
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Reports
Final reports are now available within 15 minutes from the last tracked event, which provides SITO Mobile’s team with accurate, up-to-date campaign-performance data.
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Frequency capping
The DSP now provides granular frequency-capping by querying user-level data at low latency.
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Campaign reporting
Campaign reports now include 13 dimensions and 27 metrics (country, language, device type, geolocation, carrier, etc.), which allows SITO Mobile’s team to create more accurate audiences to improve targeting and boost campaign performance.
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Automation
We can dedicate more time to developing features for the DSP, as we’ve automated numerous manual and repetitive tasks.
Keys to our successful partnership with SITO Mobile
Our experience in advertising-technology development has allowed us to:
- Understand the specific technical and business needs of the project based on our prior experience in developing a DSP and other AdTech platforms.
- Proactively engage with other advertising-technology vendors to develop the necessary solutions—e.g. the discrepancy-reporting mechanism.
- Avoid the steep learning curve, common pitfalls, and obstacles that inexperienced developers face when building advertising technology.
- Suggest solutions to problems and new features based on our understanding of the online advertising ecosystem.
Our full-service development teams
Each one of our teams consists of UX/UI and graphic designers, frontend and backend developers, tech leads, project managers, QA specialists, and DevOps. This availability of resources, combined with our 24/7 monitoring service and SLA, allowed us to handle all the technical aspects of the project, which enabled our client to focus on optimizing its clients’ campaigns and onboarding new advertisers.
Our agile approach to AdTech development
By applying various aspects of agile development to the project, we are able to test new and improved features with our client every two weeks and make immediate improvements to the platform based on client feedback.
The technologies we used
Python
AWS
The result
The project last for several years, with Clearcode not only delivering the project’s requirements, but also providing long-term technical support.
The SITO Mobile project was one of the biggest development projects we’ve ever worked on. We’re able to gain invaluable experience and skills in building a large-scale DSP and solving challenging technical problems.