Aequus case study

Background

Aequus is a next generation hybrid bidding and mediation platform for publishers. It is a neutral, open, and transparent platform, built exclusively for serving publishers’ interests. With many features such as advanced A/B testing, Network Ranking Tool, over 25+ demand partners and bidder floor management, publishers are able to grow the LTV.

Problem

For monetization, publishers work with many demand sources. The key focus for Aequus was helping their publishers optimize the meditation stack. A (mediation) monetization report for a publisher might look like as follows, where revenue, fill rates, impressions, and eCPMs are broken down by:

Date

App

Platform: iOS, Android

App version

Country

Ad Unit Name

Ad format: banner, interstitial

Placement_name

Demand source

Publisher monetization managers are responsible for ensuring that a publisher does not leave a lot of money on the table.

As an example, if a demand source is filling all of the ad requests at a certain CPM and it is contributing a significant amount to the overall revenue, it is perhaps worthwhile to add another call to the demand source at a 10% higher floor CPM. Doing so is however a big challenge because this analysis needs to be repeated for each app, platform, country, and ad format . There might be tens of thousands of different combinations of app, platform, country, and ad format that a monetization manager might need to look at.

Similarly, monetization managers would like to be alerted when the revenue or fill rate for a demand_source changed significantly and the impact was greater than a fixed amount. Say ten thousand dollars. Finding these problems ahead of time can have significant business impact, since the problem can go undetected for dozens of time periods.

In addition to overall revenue KPIs, monetization managers also like to look at ARPDAU (average revenue per daily_active_user).

Solution

Aequus turned to BoostKPI for helping its publishers. Aequus already had a robust API that exposed all this granular data. BoostKPI was able to integrate the API and was up-and-running in a matter of hours and days.

With BoostKPI’s self-serve platform, Aequus was able to create the correct derived KPIs.

Here is an example of an overall alert on revenue that was sent via email. The alert is sent if the daily estimated revenue is 10% off from the average of the same week day for the last four weeks, i.e., if today is a Monday, it compares today’s value to the average of the last four Mondays.

Here is an example of an alert on fill rate and high revenue. For many publishers, these alerts could be sent on a cadence of their choosing – it could be daily, every few days, or weekly, or any other number of days.

Dilpesh Parmar, Co-founder of Aequus Ads says:

“A challenge of the diverse ads ecosystem is that publishers need to work with a variety of demand partners to maximize their monetization. A single demand partner might not be the best across all platforms, ad formats , countries, and eCPM floors. With tens of thousands of different ad units, it is a nightmare to manage even with all the data (thanks to a transparent platform like Aequus) available at your fingertips. ‍ BoostKPI is indispensable to making the monetization manager’s life easier. They can receive automated alerts for all monetization aspects. They no longer have to spend hours manually slicing and dicing the network reports; BoostKPI does it automatically. BoostKPI is a super-power that every brilliant marketing manager should use.“‍