Publisher Protection

How Adasta Prevents Redirects And Recovered 8% Of Monthly Lost Revenue

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Stop redirects and help reclaim 8% of lost revenue per month
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Improve relationships with their publishers through better ad security
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Regain the 10% of working hours previously spent detecting security issues

In a Nutshell

Using GeoEdge’s state-of-the-art technology to block attacks in real time, Adasta was able to stop hundreds of malvertising attacks to their publishers each day. In the process, GeoEdge’s solution allowed Adasta’s publishers to regain the 8% of monthly revenue they lost to redirects. Today, Adasta can look forward to growing their relationships with their publishers long into the future, by providing their publishers with ads they can trust.
GeoEdge solves an industry problem, and the service works very well. Our publishers who had previously turned o advertising on weekends now feel safe monetizing their sites around the clock.
Simone Chizzali

CEO & Founder at Adasta Media

The Problem

Adasta is a digital sales house that partners with publishers in Italy and Spain. Adasta manages ad auctions for their publisher partners and mediates relationships with SSPs and other demand sources. Adasta’s position in the supply chain gives them a pivotal role in maintaining a publisher’s reputation among its end users. While each publisher’s responsibility is to provide high-quality content and a premium experience that keeps users returning to and monetizing their properties for the long haul,

Adasta’s responsibility is to provide suitably high-quality ads to the publisher. Failing to respond effectively to publishers’ quality concerns gives the publisher little incentive to continue any business relationship at all.

Adasta’s Italian and Spanish publishers in particular face problems with auto-redirects. The problem is especially pronounced on mobile devices—where the user cannot easily navigate away from the redirect site—and during holidays—when bad actors know they can exploit the fact that publishers’ employees are also on holiday

With every redirect, publishers lose the opportunity to monetize that user’s session, and lose some of that user’s trust going forward. The publishers’ immediate revenue and long-term reputation are at risk. Those publishers, in turn held Adasta accountable for supplying them with bad ads that caused those monetization and reputation issues. Adasta knew they would lose those publishers’ business unless they cleaned up their ads.

In the month of August 2018—peak holiday season—Adasta’s publishers lost 8% of their ad revenue to mobile redirects. Their publishers noticed a similar revenue drop through the remainder of the year, on weekends and over the Christmas holiday. One of their publishers went so far as to turn off monetization each and every weekend, rather than place their users at risk. Consistently losing such a large share of revenue month after month presented a serious and unsustainable issue to publishers, and thereby for Adasta as well.

The most important metric to Adasta is the hundreds of malware attacks that GeoEdge blocks on a daily basis. GeoEdge blocks a huge amount of malvertising in our network, and we are increasing the number of our publisher sites that GeoEdge monitors
Simone Chizzali

CEO & Founder at Adasta Media

The Solution

Adasta attempted to detect redirects on their own, but found the process to be painstaking, manual, and highly inefficient. They had to ask their publishers for screenshots of an affected mobile device, showing the time the redirect occurred, and then investigating which SSP won the auction at that time. From there, Adasta would either contact the DSP and ask them to block the bad ads, or ask the SSP to block the source in their own exchange.

This clearly wasn’t a good long-term solution. It only allowed blocking known issues in retrospect, rather than detecting issues in real time – and Adasta was able to identify the sources of bad ads only some of the time.

Adasta eventually found and partnered with GeoEdge by way of a referral. GeoEdge began monitoring Adasta’s publisher sites, using machine learning technology to identify and block malvertising attacks. Implementing GeoEdge’s tools called for a simple integration that required minimal time and effort from Adasta’s teams – an integration Adasta considered to be “plug-and-play”. GeoEdge’s technology allowed visibility into inventory across Adasta’s publisher network, and immediately began to understand the particular varieties of malicious activity in those regions. After learning and identifying the nature of malicious attacks in those markets, GeoEdge tech began blocking the attacks before they reached the publisher’s site.

After integrating with GeoEdge, Adasta noticed that the number of unique attacks on its network had dropped by hundreds each day. Adasta’s publishers regained the revenue they had lost to disrupted sessions, disgruntled users, and turned-off monetization. Adasta’s teams also regained the time—about 10% of their own working hours—that they had spent mediating between publishers, SSPs and DSPs to stop the flow of bad ads on their own.

Adasta is now extending GeoEdge monitoring and blocking solutions across all of its publishers, and plans to integrate GeoEdge on the server side to increase further protection. GeoEdge security has, in turn, secured and taken Adasta’s relationship with their publishers to a new level, while allowing Adasta’s teams to focus on strategically managing advertising for its partners.

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