Openads: OpenX’s Commitment to Traffic Quality Continues Options

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At OpenX, we’re big believers in quality. Quality can take different forms – such as ad quality, publisher quality, or traffic quality – but they’re all important to the task of building a trusted marketplace. Our core belief is that high-quality publishers attract more buyers and deepen their engagement with OpenX Market. Conversely, low-quality supply drives buyers out of OpenX Market, reducing its liquidity and value for all participants.

The challenge is scale. We serve billions of impressions every day, matching buyers’ ads with publisher inventory based on highly specific targeting and filtering settings. We receive ad requests from millions of URLs. How do we make sense of all this activity and ensure a good experience for buyers?

To answer that question, we’d like to give you a peek behind the curtain:

• Our Traffic Quality specialists spend their waking hours figuring out how to prevent bad traffic from accessing OpenX Market. These experts in data mining, statistics, and fraud detection have developed sophisticated systems to continuously monitor billions of events a day, looking for traffic patterns and anomalies that suggest robotic or fraudulent activity. We block a huge number of requests before they ever enter Market to protect buyers from invalid traffic.
• Our Operations team reviews and classifies publisher sites to give buyers full transparency into the inventory they’re buying. They help provide buyers with the confidence that when they are buying the Pets category, for example, they’re getting inventory in that category. Just as important, their work helps ensure that ads don’t show up on sites in categories our buyers don’t want.
• We turn away a significant number of sites during our qualification process for new publishers. On average, 12-15% of sites are declined each week for failure to meet our Supply Policy.
• We β€œscrub” the Market on a regular basis, removing publisher sites that fail to meet our traffic-quality requirement or that violate our Supply Policy.
• We’ve partnered with best-of-breed third-party services to supplement our in-house efforts. We work with these companies to monitor publisher sites for objectionable content, score the quality of traffic, and maintain a brand-safe environment.

We’ve seen impressive results from these initiatives. In four months since June 2012, we’ve seen a 20% improvement in the quality of clicks delivered to buyers (when quality is defined as likelihood of clicks to convert).

OpenX is committed to quality, and we’ve invested heavily to create a safe and trusted marketplace. We invite you to learn more about our commitment to marketplace quality by contacting us here.

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