SITO Mobile

A mobile demand-side platform (DSP) that helps the world’s largest 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
  • 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.

Founded in 2000, SITO Mobile is a NASDAQ-listed AdTech company

Transforming data into deep insights that power media and research-driven solutions for the world’s biggest brands.

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.

Below are the main challenges it faced, how we solved them, and the result they had on the SITO Mobile DSP and its business.

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:

Bid requests

The DSP is able to receive 260,000 queries per second (QPS)—i.e. bid requests.

Instances

If and when instances become faulty or unresponsive, we can launch new ones quickly, allowing our team to maintain high availability of the DSP.

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.

Automation

We can dedicate more time to developing features for the DSP, as we’ve automated numerous manual and repetitive tasks.

Frequency capping

The DSP now provides granular frequency-capping by querying user-level data at low latency.

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.

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.

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.

Clearcode helps SITO Mobile improve the performance and stability of its DSP

Download the full SITO Mobile case study

Download for free!

How much will it cost to build or expand your DSP?

Talk to one of our AdTech development teams and find out how we can help you get initial time and cost estimates for your project

SCHEDULE A CALL NOW

Clearcode helps SITO Mobile solve its technical challenges and deploys various Amazon Web Services to improve the performance and stability of its DSP.

Download the full SITO Mobile case study