One AdTech Company’s Journey to Higher-Performing Ad Campaigns and Greater Cost Efficiency

Start Free Trial
April 25, 2019 by Updated April 1st, 2024

Anyone in AdTech knows the market is incredibly fragmented. Despite rapid growth — 38 percent from 2016 to 2017 — a considerable share of the market is still up for grabs. To carve out their place in the industry, AdTech companies must ensure they offer clients an optimized ad funnel strategy that maximizes effectiveness while minimizing ad spend.

Analyzing data in a timely manner is critical to delivering the best message at the right time to the right viewers — and at the lowest possible cost. A global advertising and communications company found that the right big data platform can make all the difference on this front. This company works directly with clients to deliver real-time data insights that increase the effectiveness of their media advertising campaigns. However, the company faced critical challenges including:

  • Delivering time-sensitive data to traders, analysts, and account executives
  • Providing analyses to improve bid performance while decreasing spend
  • Eliminating the data bottleneck between the data team and data users
  • Reducing margin errors with more in-depth insights

Effective Ad Campaigns Start with Your Data Platform

When data leaders at the company realized their existing data infrastructure was holding them back, they sought a different approach to improve productivity and positively impact client relationships. They selected Qubole to address their top-priority data challenges and improve client ad campaigns.

With Qubole, the data team is able to more effectively analyze unstructured and semi-structured data from log files and raw vendor files. Data team members can easily code in the language of their choice and leverage Presto for SQL. Furthermore, the team now has the ability to leverage both historical and real-time data for a comprehensive portrait of campaign performance. Historical results allow the data te999am to identify performance trends, while new data such as web crawler data provide a more dynamic view for ad campaigns.

Using Qubole, the company can feed information directly into their Business Intelligence (BI) platform for digestion by data users. Now they require a team of just five to build out analytics capabilities and make reports readily available. As a result, the company’s more than 250 data users have self-service access to reports and insights.

Increasing Cost Efficiency with Analytical Insights

Qubole enables the company’s data users to review and analyze auctions for programmatic ads, ensuring auction bids are effective and cost-efficient. Users are able to analyze log data for impressions won, identify bid purchases, and explore the cost impact of first-price auctions compared to second-price auctions. All of this information allows traders to clearly identify which inventory to purchase and helps analysts to better serve clients.

Errors entered by traders can also significantly impact the company’s profit margins as well as their relationships with clients. Using Qubole, the data team was able to run analyses that identified and reduced a significant number of errors — saving the company four million dollars.

Optimizing Clients’ Ad Campaigns

By analyzing data collected about user visits and ad conversions, the company was able to optimize their ad frequency. Through the data, they discovered that users exhibited a variety of patterns: some visited a single site 15 times before purchasing, while others visited three websites on three occasions before converting.

The team then built a recommendation engine to determine the frequency of ads per website — which includes granular findings the company found to be superior to Google Analytics. For one advertiser client, ad frequency changes identified using this recommendation engine resulted in annual savings of 320 thousand dollars.

The AdTech company leverages the depth of analytics and insights available through Qubole to empowers hundreds of data users and improve client advertising programs.

Learn more about how this AdTech customer is drastically improving clients’ ad spend in our free downloadable case study.

Start Free Trial
Read Data Science at Honestbee: Parsing Event Logs with Apache Spark and Sparklyr on Qubole