Sovrn Moves from 24-Hour Delay to Real-Time Data with StarTree Cloud

Web publishers need rapid data to compete in the modern digital media landscape. This is especially true when it comes to revenue-generating online ads and affiliate links. If an ad slot on a web page isn’t working—visitors aren’t clicking on it, or it fails to capture impressions—publishers need to know quickly so that they can remove or adjust the advertisement and continue to monetize their content with success.

Sovrn, which provides AdTech solutions to web publishers, had been successfully delivering data reports to its customers with a turnaround time of about 24 to 48 hours. Already an industry leader, the company set a goal to outperform its responsive data delivery speeds and offer even faster data reporting with higher-volume analytics.

Rapid data reporting is critical to Sovrn’s customers given the AdTech solutions that the company specializes in. Unlike ads that appear inside walled gardens like Facebook, where publishers must adhere to the conventions of the platform, including how material is moderated, filtered, and viewed by the public, Sovrn develops solutions for the open web, where attention is diffused and publishers call all the shots on website content-related decisions. They need rapid data to act nimbly and respond to changing traffic patterns and click-through rates. Optimized data reporting gives these publishers a tremendous edge to put their best content first and capture value with this content.

To ensure its customers stay competitive in the crowded world of web publishing, Sovrn turned to StarTree on the AWS platform to speed up its delivery of rich data reporting.

Custom solutions

Sovrn has customers that range from independent blogs to national news agencies, which is why it prioritizes custom solutions. It offers a variety of core products so that each customer can best serve their unique audience. Rather than one-size-fits-all data analytics, the company has also provided data reporting that is tailored to the individual needs of its customers.

The company knew its goal to speed up and enhance data reporting could not come at the expense of the custom reporting it offered its diverse customers. When the software engineering team learned about the granular reporting capabilities that Apache Pinot provides, it seemed like a natural fit. Pinot captures and segments extensive batches of data, allowing Sovrn’s customers to drill down to specifics like what dimensions of ads they wish to work with or detailed metrics on visitor behavior. 

“Pinot looked great,” said Chris Prokopiak, a principal software engineer at Sovrn, recalling his first impression of the data store. But there was a catch. “It also looked fairly complicated to set up and run.” 

The team was concerned about the resources it would take to install and manage Pinot themselves. They were already frustrated with the time and costs involved in managing a customer reporting solution internally, and they prioritized switching to a managed service. Sovrn first switched to ScyllaDB to directly replace Apache Cassandra, the open source database it had been managing on its own infrastructure. The managed service the company turned to, Scylla Cloud, offered improved performance and reduced costs, but it was still lacking the rich reporting capabilities Sovrn aimed to deliver to its customers.

Sovrn needed a managed service to streamline operations, but it also aimed for the enhanced data reporting that only Apache Pinot could provide. In 2022, the company found out about StarTree, a managed solution for Pinot. StarTree met all of their needs, and a plan was put in motion for Sovrn to switch again, this time from Scylla Cloud.

The Power of AWS

StarTree acts as a “Bring Your Own Cloud” (BYOC) managed service to marshal the power of Sovrn’s AWS investments. Using StarTree Cloud’s BYOC deployment, all of Sovrn’s data in Apache Pinot remains within their own AWS account, running as a Kubernetes cluster on EC2 instances.

Sovrn opted to use StarTree’s tiered storage capability, which keeps two years of less-frequently queried data in AWS S3 for cost savings, while its most recent six months of data are kept in Elastic Block Storage (EBS) to enable swift responses to queries.

StarTree, which is part of the AWS Partner Network, seamlessly manages Sovrn’s AWS data and infrastructure. It creates a simplified solution that leverages the robustness of AWS with the granularity of Pinot to rapidly surface insights from vast troves of data.

StarTree Cloud

Sovrn’s analytics platform helps publishers understand their content’s revenue impact and optimize it. Previously, it could provide data back to the publisher in a day or two. With StarTree Cloud, they can see changes in revenue, clicks, and page views in less than a second.

StarTree Cloud provides managed hosting for Apache Pinot and additional services to make it easy for businesses like Sovrn to adopt real-time analytics. With StarTree Cloud, they can handle over 180 million view events, 10 million click events, and 1 million revenue events across their platform of 2700 publishers.

Tiered storage

Sovrn is also leveraging Tiered Storage to manage data storage. Tiered Storage allows Sovrn to save money on cloud storage and keep its customers’ data when needed!

“Using tiered storage, we can keep costs down but still have access to that data until we have the information we need to move that data out. Q4 is always a busy time for our publishers, and they want to look back potentially a year or two years ago and see what that is,” said Ryan Chichiroco, VP of Engineering at Sovrn. “We don’t want to keep that data necessarily unless we know that our customers need it. By using tiered storage, we still have access to that data if we want to go get it.”

The benefits of optimized data reporting

The solutions that Sovrn has developed with StarTree enable customers to act swiftly and flexibly to better serve their readers. Before, a website publishing a series of reviews using Sovrn’s affiliate linking tools might have waited two days to see metrics. Now, the same publisher sees down-to-the-second, real-time data that shows whether or not visitors are clicking affiliate links. Publishers can instantly decide to develop content that maximizes revenue opportunities or pivot to a new approach if the content isn’t driving clicks. With real-time data reporting, publishers have insights to better create relevant content and boost readership across the website.  

Previously, Sovrn had created ad hoc reports that a team had to manage individually for each customer. The data was limited compared to what the company now shares with its customers using Pinot. Now, richer reporting is available for customers to access through the Sovrn Platform. Customers can use APIs to directly pull data reports, download CSV files, or set up scheduled reports to appear at a preferred cadence.

StarTree on the AWS platform “opened up a number of features that we had wanted to get out to customers, but we didn’t have the technology in place to do before,” said Prokopiak.

An industry leader defining the future of AdTech

StarTree has not only optimized experiences for Sovrn’s customers, but it has also optimized Sovrn as an organization. 

With StarTree, engineers at Sovrn now have the capacity to focus on developing new products and features for the Sovrn Platform rather than devoting excessive time to managing databases. Likewise, the business intelligence team that had been developing ad hoc reports at Sovrn is now freed with the capacity to research trends in bidding patterns and marketplace strategies and to continue to position the company as an AdTech leader.

 “StarTree helps us at Sovrn focus on what our customers need to adapt to the changing AdTech market,” said Chris Prokopiak. And in turn, “we can help our publishers focus on developing the content and reading experiences that make their websites great.”

StarTree & Sovrn featured in Datanami

“It’s been smooth sailing for Sovrn since implementing Pinot in late 2022. StarTree has conducted live upgrades, minimizing downtime…,” said Alex Woodie, Managing Editor at Datanami. “But the big news is that Sovrn’s affiliate marketing customers now have access to much fresher data than before. The 24 to 48 hour lag between when consumers do something on the Internet and when their activity is logged into Pinot has all but been eliminated.”

Read the full Datanami article for more.

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