The 1bn dollar question: Is your website running at peak efficiency?

The big bang in digital media technology over the past two decades has left us with a tech terrain resembling a chaotic spaghetti bowl that only grows more tangled each day. Digital media websites grapple with an assortment of over a hundred tech vendors, ranging from content management and tracking solutions to marketing/advertising platforms and data management systems to name just a few. It’s a tech jungle out there.  

With each new vendor, the data deluge intensifies—its volume, velocity, and complexity spiraling out of control. Professionals in the digital publishing industry, drowned in this sea of information, struggle to keep up, jeopardizing revenue, service quality, and raising the stakes on security and compliance risk (call me GDPR or local equivalent). 

What’s eating Digital Publishers? 

After completing a series of interviews with 50 CEOs and senior professionals from digital publishers of different sizes in the multiple countries Project Agora operates. There is a clear underlying anxiety: How do I know if my website runs at peak efficiency? 

Depending on the exact role this usually permeates into four different broad responsibility areas: 

1. Revenue Growth: What is stopping us from generating the revenues we should be generating? 
2. Traffic Generation: What are the bottlenecks limiting the volume of traffic we should be attracting?  
3. Audience Engagement: What is harnessing visitor engagement? 
4. Business Continuity: Are we prepared to detect and react to the growing number of risks? 

To effectively do their work all those job functions, from the CEO down to the Audience, Ad-Ops and Technical teams need real-time visibility of the entire technology tech stack — from infrastructure through on premise or cloud applications all the way out to third-party APIs and platforms — to be able to monitor, fix (and ideally prevent) problems, or capture identified opportunities.  

What do they currently have?  

• A medley of monitoring tools, disparate and locally confined in each department. 
• A slew of antiquated Excel files, fragmented and outdated. 
• Siloed teams toiling away, spending an absurd amount of time “preparing reports.” 
• Non-stop firefighting, perpetual crisis mode. 
• All of the above, shrouded in the challenges of hiring and retaining tech talent, and navigating a regulatory maze that accrues an eternal “tech debt.” 

Sounds familiar? Then please keep reading.  

Welcome “Real-Time Observability” for Media Owners 

Observability, a term originally used in quantum mechanics, is used in software engineering to describe the process of capturing data from multiple systems and building visibility into every layer of a company’s tech stack. High-quality observability systems have learning algorithms that can understand the past health of services and applications to help point to what is happening and predict what’s going to happen in the future. 

At Project Agora, we have been working with 3.500 websites over the last decade, building technology to help simplify operations and maximize the value they get out of their visitors. In the process, we have built several internal observability features.
We felt that the time is prime to externalize and expand those solutions to help Media Owners build observability across their business. 

So, where do we stand? 

After months of dedicated development, we have made a public launch of the Project Agora Observability Platform.

Following the initial onboarding and quality assurance process with a lead time of less than 24 hours for account activation, a Media Owner is now able to see immediate value via 3 distinct modules:  

• OBSERVE: Seize control, with a consolidated overview and peace of mind through anomaly-detecting incidents, ensuring everything revenue critical operates efficiently. 
• ANALYZE: Unlock deeper analysis and data driven actioning with insightful synthetic Business Intelligence dashboards​. 
• MONETIZE: Fast-track and grow your revenue generation activities using Project Agora’s existing demand integrations and yield optimization technology. 

OBSERVE: Overview  

Monetization: We ingest and consolidate the data from all site revenue sources (i.e. Google Advertising Manager and 3rd party Supply Side Platforms) and showing them under one integrated dashboard so that you can confidently know on a real-time basis how much each of your websites earns in total, what is the total value of every session and the corresponding fill rate. You can now leave outdated excel files in the past.

Traffic: We fully track traffic events per user, using our own proprietary technology, so that you can monitor User Sessions, Traffic Sources’ contribution and your SEO Authority Ranking. We track each of those metrics on desktop and mobile separately so subject to an anomaly event impacting your traffic you know exactly where the issue is. 

Engagement: We use the same sorcery to track audience behavior at the pageview and pageviews per session level. Unveil trends and enhance user experience by reviewing patterns split between mobile and desktop on a daily or hourly basis. 

Performance: We monitor and provide an overall performance benchmark for your website so that you understand how well it is optimized in terms of speed and user experience. To make this actionable, we split the analysis across mobile and desktop in Core Web Vitals and other web performance metrics, so you can identify the root cause of any anomaly. 

OBSERVE: Incidents 

Rest easy, knowing you’re the first to know when incidents occur. Our algorithmic models use historical and real-time data to detect, predict, and prioritize based on severity, revenue or user experience impact, saving your teams time from issue detection and root cause identification.   

In the current release the events we track include:  

• Ad-Revenue Drop/Rise 
• Pageviews Drop/Rise   
• RPM Drop/Rise  
• Vulnerability & Security Risks 
• Home Page Non-Availability 
• SSL Expiration
• Domain Expiration 

We are reducing event clutter and false positives with algorithmic anomaly detection, automatically concealing duplicate events, and correlating relevant occurrences under the same incident to help focus alerting on the relevant ones only.  

(We keep adding to the list of meaningful events we track with every new release so stay tuned).  

ANALYZE: Ad Revenue

Seamlessly connect your advertising data sources to get a custom Business Intelligence solution to unveil the trends of your revenue metrics at a granular level.  Currently filtering is available by:  

• Time Period 
• Website (if you have more than one) 
• Ad-Format (Display, Video, Native) 
• Ad-Revenue Platform (Google or other 3rd party Supply Side Platforms)
• Ad-Revenue Type (Open Exchange, PMP Deals, Direct) 

MONETIZE: Project Agora 

Under the Monetize module we feature Project Agora’s ad-tech suite which is used by approximately 2.500 publishers worldwide for direct monetization and yield optimization purposes. The ever-expanding list of ad-tech solutions is utilizing tens of different demand partner integrations in Native, Programmatic Display & Video. It comes suitable for any site setup with minimum involvement or maintenance on the publisher side to generate ad revenue. Natively integrated with the Observe & Analyze modules, you will see this dataset aggregated with the other revenue data sources you have connected.  

In a nutshell: 

Project Agora’s new platform most important benefit is creating the observability layer needed to reclaim control of your business in the complex ecosystem Media Owners operate in. Effectively this means that you can: 

• Earn More: Optimize Ad-Inventory Performance and Bid Density. 
• Grow Visits & Pageviews: Identify actionable trends in your traffic sources, your SEO ranking, your visitor engagement, your Speed & Core Web Vitals performance.  
• Sleep well at night: Ensure someone is watching over key operations and security procedures and alerting you when they falter. 

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