Facing significant delays in discovering important incidents in their active, online business, PMC’s data science team needed a better way to stay on top of business incidents.
PMC had been relying on Google Analytics’ alert function. However, the problem was that they had to know what they’re looking for in order to set the alerts in Google Analytics. This was really time consuming and some things tended to get missed, especially with millions of users across dozens of professional publications.
A Bit About Penske Media Corporation (PMC)
PMC is a leading digital media and information services company. Its owned and operated brands reach more than 179 million visitors monthly and Penske Media was recently named one of the Top 100 Private Companies in the United States and North America. PMC is one of the largest digital media companies in the world, publishing more than 20 digital media brands including PMC Studios, WWD, Footwear News, M, Deadline.com, Variety magazine, Beauty Inc, Movieline, and more. PMC additionally owns and produces more than 80 annual events, summits, award shows and conferences while housing a dynamic research and emerging data business.
Finding Issues Even Without Knowing What to Look For
And then came Anodot.
Anodot’s AI Analytics started by tracking PMC’s Google Analytics activity, identifying anomalous behavior in impressions and click-through-rates for advertising units.
Analyzing the Google Analytics data, Anodot identified a new trend where a portion of the traffic to one of PMC’s media properties came from a “bad actor” – referral spam that was artificially inflating visitor statistics. For PMC’s analytics team, spotting this issue would have meant the impossible – that they already knew what they were looking for in advance. After discovering this by using Anodot, PMC was able to block the spam traffic, and free up critical resources for legitimate visitors. PMC could then accurately track the traffic that mattered the most, enabling PMC executives to make more informed decisions.
If a story in one of our publications goes wild, we see spikes in our data which Anodot catches. Our editorial team can use the information about successful content themes derived from Anodot’s analytics.
Andrew Maguire, PMC’s Head Data Scientist
Moving Forward: PMC uses Anodot for Intelligent Alerting
PMC plans to apply Anodot to provide an intelligent alerting system driven by machine learning with hardly any direction required from business users in terms of complex rules or triggers. PMC will incorporate Anodot into more core sources of data across the business and implement even more nuanced custom tracking on top of Google Analytics so that they can track key metrics that matter.
Click here to download the full case study and find out how Anodot’s AI Analytics integrated with Google Analytics is helping PMC to prevent revenue loss, remedying urgent problems quickly, and capturing opportunities fast.
Written by Anodot
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