The Problem

This digital marketing company is a digital sales house that partners with publishers in Italy and Spain. They manages ad auctions for their publisher partners and mediates relationships with SSPs and other demand sources. Their 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, Their 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. This Company'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 an accountable for supplying them with bad ads that caused those monetization and reputation issues. They knew they would lose those publishers’ business unless they cleaned up their ads. In the month of August 2018—peak holiday season—their 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 them as well.

The Solution

They 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, they 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 they were able to identify the sources of bad ads only some of the time. They eventually found and partnered with Limeproxies by way of a referral. Limeproxies began monitoring publisher sites, using machine learning technology to identify and block malvertising attacks. Implementing Limeproxies tools called for a simple integration that required minimal time and effort from teams – an integration considered to be “plug-and-play”. Limeproxies technology allowed visibility into inventory across 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, Limeproxies tech began blocking the attacks before they reached the publisher’s site. After integrating with Limeproxies , they noticed that the number of unique attacks on its network had dropped by hundreds each day. publishers regained the revenue they had lost to disrupted sessions, disgruntled users, and turned-off monetization. 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. They are now extending Limeproxies monitoring and blocking solutions across all of its publishers, and plans to integrate Limeproxies on the server side to increase further protection. Limeproxies security has, in turn, secured and taken relationship with their publishers to a new level, while allowing teams to focus on strategically managing advertising for its partners.