Sovrn takes inventory quality extremely seriously. As a founding member of the IAB’s TOGI (Traffic of Good Intent) committee, with over two million sites in its network, we recognize it is crucial to invest heavily in quality control, which is why we have streamlined our approach to ensure the sites in our network are brand-safe and remain free of suspicious traffic. Outlined below is a detailed look at our processes to stamp out malicious activity.
Before permitting new publishers into the Sovrn network, our Ad Operations team uses a host of processes to thoroughly vet our publishers, including:
- Human evaluation for quality and safe content.
- Strong partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS) to deliver site ratings across seven different categories: adult content, illegal download, hate speech, alcohol, drugs, offensive language and suspicious traffic (SAM score). This process offers a third-party audit of Sovrn inventory.
- Employ proprietary technology as well as whitelists and blacklists from a variety of third parties from within the adtech ecosystem.
After permitting publishers and their domains into the Sovrn network our Ad Operations team continuously monitors our entire stack in real-time to take action against fraudulent sites. Our process includes:
- Post-delivery malware analysis.
- Dynamic IAS scoring and proprietary technology to vet traffic in real-time.
- Continuous re-evaluation of sites to ensure site scores across the seven filters are clean.
- Partnership with Adometry to help identify suspicious IP addresses as well as artificial clicks.
- Block all domains associated with invalid activity.
- Hired dedicated individuals within both Engineering and Operations who are 100% responsible for auditing Sovrn inventory to ensure brand safety and identify invalid ad requests from non-human sources.
- Manually identifying suspicious IP or reader patterns.
- Automated reports that flag abnormal click-through rates, excessive tags per page and odd traffic spikes.
Sovrn continues to innovate and enhance our approach to network hygiene with the following measures:
- Strengthen our partnership with IAS and Adometry to ensure we are maintaining the absolute best solution to guarantee inventory quality.
- Receive certification by the IAB’s Quality Assurance Guideline initiative by April 2014. This certification demonstrates that we have achieved a new level of excellence in trust, transparency, quality and safety.
- Regenerate and implement a global whitelist in 2014.
Why should publishers care?
By hyper-focusing on network hygiene, we’ve positioned Sovrn in the marketplace as the largest exchange with the most extensive whitelist. This matters to our publishers because it matters to our demand partners. Advertisers are more willing to spend more of their budgets on quality inventory, something a whitelist guarantees. By branding ourselves as the cleanest exchange in the ecosystem, we’ve been able to align ourselves with the highest quality demand partners in the business. These strategic partnerships have allowed our advertisers to gain access to the kind of inventory they’re looking for, which in turn means the quality publishers that deserve higher CPMs and fill are finally starting to get it.
