Mobile advertising software development

Client

A full-cycle mobile marketing agency headquartered in Chicago, with seven years of experience in providing strategy, monetization and consulting services for app businesses in North America and Europe.

Mobile advertising is one of the core services the agency offers to its customers launching ad campaigns and acquiring relevant users on their behalf. To increase the efficiency of this service, the company needed a mobile advertising technology solution aimed at buying mobile traffic from diverse sources and optimizing ad performance.

Challenge

The client presented us with the challenge of helping its employees manage high volumes of mobile traffic coming from multiple publishers, controlling the ad buying process in real-time, and optimizing ad performance for customer's KPIs. The digital agency also expected the new solution to be integratable with accounting software Intuit Quickbooks and CRM Google Insightly they already have been using.

The client already had a negative experience in using 3rd party mobile advertising SaaS in the past due to high service fees and lack of customization. We took those issues into consideration and successfully avoided them while building the MVP.

Solution

DIGI117's development team has built mobile advertising technology software that allowed agency employees responsible for ad buying to perform the following actions:

• Integrate new partners using S2S tracking URL and JS tag
• Run performance-based ad campaigns including CPM, CPC, CPA, CPL
• Set up ad targeting by various parameters, for example, geo, devices, interests
• Measure and optimize ad performance for certain KPIs, such as conversion rate, click-through rate, in-app purchase, post-install actions
• Manage user profiles and sync contacts data with Insightly CRM
• Generate invoices and sync billing data with Quickbooks accounting software

These following key system components enabled scalable mobile advertising services:

• Complex server-to-server logic for setting up and tracking mobile ad buying between customers (advertisers) and vendors (publishers)
• Campaign management functionality to create, target and measure ad campaigns
• Contact management functionality that syncs advertiser and publisher data with existing CRM
• Detailed real-time reporting and analytics, including spreadsheets, graphs, and downloadable CSV/PDF files
• AI-powered ad optimization that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to analyze ongoing ad performance and optimize it for campaign KPIs
• Billing module that records finance data per campaign and creates respective invoice to be uploaded to existing finance software via API

Technologies

To deliver the above-mentioned features of the mobile advertising technology solution, DIGI117’s team used Node.js-based framework and NGINX web server, empowering JavaScript’s natural performance and scalability for high-load systems. To organize campaign statistics and data storage, our developers leveraged MongoDB and ClickHouse database technologies and implemented flexible Redis data caching. Google AI was integrated as part of the campaign management module to optimize ad performance and target KPIs.

The system was designed as a cloud-based microservice backend architecture deployed with AWS. It utilized default progressive page-load together with server-side rendering that improved UX. A special emphasis was made on the fast processing of big data for real-time campaign analytics and reporting.

Results

The solution allowed our client to improve its mobile advertising services by offering high-quality mobile traffic and users to its customers and partners. The new product enabled agency employees to manage ad campaigns and optimize ad performance for desired KPIs in real-time.

Leveraging the software functionality, the agency was able to obtain several benefits:

• Providing high-quality mobile advertising services to its customers at scale
• Increasing return on ad spend by 28% thanks to AI-powered ad tracking and optimization
• Reducing overhead expenses by 85% as compared to 3rd party software service fees.