Minute Media is a leading technology and digital content company. The company’s proprietary video and multimedia publishing platform, Voltax, powers the creation, distribution, consumption and monetization of third party publishers and advertisers as well as our own sports and culture content brands, including The Players’ Tribune, FanSided, 90min, DBLTAP, Mental Floss and The Big Lead.
The Challenge
As Minute Media’s business scaled, it became increasingly difficult to keep tabs on incidents that impacted user experience, revenue, and costs. The company needed a solution that could help:
• Identify underlying issues in the platform to prevent penalties with Google and other supply-side platforms
• Understand issues with the integrity of data aggregated from a wide variety of sources
• Improve the ad profit margins, especially during consistently changing patterns such as the pandemic
• Prevent revenue loss by quickly notifying of fraudulent bot clicks on video ads
The Solution
Minute Media’s AdOps, BI and SEO, and sales and marketing teams have integrated Anodot into their data aggregation and analysis. They’re leveraging the platform to proactively protect revenue, investigate data integrity and platform issues, and improve ad performance.
Anodot Reveals Granular Issues Impacting Ad Performance
The company has numerous use cases for Anodot’s autonomous anomaly detection capabilities. One of the big ones is reclaiming revenue from Google Ad Manager. At the end of each month, Google has a process where they deduct revenue from all publishers according to their own internal algorithm.
“It’s not always apparent to us how that works, but they will hint about the performance of what we’re running,” says Farangiz Fayz, Data Analyst at Minute Media. “The deduction can be a big hit on the overall revenue that we generate. We take that as a lead to investigate further so we can optimize our ad performance to reduce these monthly deductions.”
One example issue that Google can deduct revenue for is invalid traffic (IVT), such as fraudulent clicks generated by a bot, which can bleed revenue from a campaign. “Anodot can tell us exactly which unit the bad traffic is coming from and which partner was bidding on it,” says Fayz. “We can look into the bid level data in the API [application programming interface] and then we can further question Google on these penalties.”
Anodot Helps Protect Minute Media’s Bottom Line
One of the most important uses for Anodot is to help Minute Media maintain compliance with Google Ad Manager’s strict operating rules. “Most of our revenue is derived from video, and that’s why we have so many Anodot alerts built around the video player’s performance,” says Tomer Cohen,VP of BI and SEO.
For example, if there’s a problematic behavior with the player on one of our partners – say a high click-through rate – this can lead to a penalty with Google and reflect on all the sites that are monetizing on their account. If one partner site has a problem, all of their partners suffer a penalty because they are all under one Google account
To address this, their team created Anodot alerts on things like click-through rates and other behaviors that Google monitors closely. Cohen says that when Google issues a penalty, all the partner sites will be out of Google’s ad serving for at least a couple of days, which can lead to revenue losses in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
Written by Anodot
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