Ad Serving on RD.com

The Challenge: Improve Ad Serving Capabilities

Just about every web site employs some sort of ad serving solution. And yet, my team at Reader's Digest found ourselves behind the curve in what we were able to do with our very basic ad serving technology.

We weren't able to do some of the most basic ad serving tasks such as automatic rotation of ads and A/B split testing. We also had to jump through hoops to report on common statistics such as ad impressions. This, of course, was insufficient both from a maintenance and business perspective.

The Solution: Build Custom Solution Targeted to Our Needs

Although the various business units I collaborated with had different ideas of what to put in to an ad serving solution, there were key items that we all agreed were needed. The functionality we initially settled on included:

• an administration tool to deploy new ads and re-configure existing ads
• the ability to set up A/B split tests
• report on ad impressions and click-through rates
• specify what content channels an ad should appear in
• schedule ads to come out of rotation on a pre-determined date
• support the most common ad sizes
• provide various ad slot sizes and locations on RD.com web pages

The Results

We had to overcome some performance issues during our first round of testing, but once we resolved them, we were left with a fairly versatile ad serving system that suited our needs. In addition, because this was an in-house solution, there were no yearly service fees or sharing of revenue. Plus, by avoiding the software bloat that often afflicts off-the-shelf solutions, we were able to create a simple-to-maintain system.

Role

Project Manager