The Technology Behind the AK Platform
A closer look at the AK Platform technology at the 100 foot level.
At the 100 foot level, an analytics and tracking platform such as the AK Platform looks like the following:
Interface (ETL) Layer
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Ad Server | AK Ad Server is able to track and deliver dynamic or static ads. It supports all the usual features such as frequency capping, day parting, and multiple ad formats. Its real-time decision engine (see Decisioning) is able to make user attribute-level decisions (targeting and creative optimization) with no a-priori segmentation. |
| Data Collection | AK Data Collection relies on AK Universal Ad Tagging technology and external feeds to ingest and normalize heterogeneous data from websites, ad servers, client systems, and 3rd party data networks. Access to data is strictly controlled via a robust permission model. The data is normalized to establish a common baseline for segmentation, unique user counting and data costing. |
| Pixel Management & Distribution | AK Pixel Distribution provides a powerful mechanism to transfer data out of the platform to media channels, synch cookie IDs, and ping 3rd party data providers for user data. AK provides all the controls to define what pixels to fire when based on frequency capping and rotation logic. |
| Server-to-Server (S2S) | AK S2S Data Transfer provides a highly efficient way for advertisers to buy and distribute user data. The technology allows AK to immediately receive a set of qualified users, by ID, from S2S-enabled data providers (e.g. Blue Kai) and immediately transfer qualified audiences to S2S-enabled media channels, reducing cookie ramp time on any campaigns. |
Persistence and Analytics Layer
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| User Store | AK User Store provides high performance, server-side data storage/retrieval capability with unlimited storage capacity. The user store allows for scalable conversion attributions, access to rich profile data for real-time decisioning, server-to-server data transfer, and offline data mining & optimization. |
| Event Router | The Event Router moves all data collection and ad serving events from AK application servers to and between the Event Aggregator, the User Store and the Platform Engine. The Event Router enables AK's AlwaysOn closed-loop optimization process. |
| Aggregation | The Event Aggregator processes event streams at scale, supporting both simple aggregations (impressions, clicks, conversions) and complex event processing (de-duplicated unique user counts, fraud detection, custom conversion attribution models) with a level of details that provides unparalleled optimization and insights on campaign and audience performance. AK stream-based user clustering and Markovian models identify the user attributes and behavioral patterns (time-dependent) that are most predictive of performance. |
| Analytics | AK Analytics infrastructure builds and maintains OLAP cubes with near real-time access to key aggregates. Those cubes power the AK daily report delivery via custom Excel-based templates. |
Decisioning Layer
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Decisioning | AK Decisioning delivers critical data distribution, campaign selection, and creative optimization decisions in 50-80ms timeframe (excluding internet latency). The infrastructure is designed to support real-time decisions at scale based on flexible logic (e.g., Boolean, nearest-neighbor, string matching, lookups, recency & frequency, collaborative filtering, clustering (look-alike & act-alike), and statistical inference). |
| Platform Engine | AK Platform Engine is the inner core of the AK Platform decisioning infrastructure. It is designed for scale with efficient data representations resulting in extremely compact memory footprint, and robust real-time decisioning able to deal with sparse/aberrant data and flexible configuration logic. The Platform Engine implements high performance collaborative filtering algorithms to identify the best creative assets to display for a given unique user based on their cluster and their click stream data from the advertiser's website (if available). |
| Optimization | AK Optimization guides AK real-time decisioning with machine learning-based adjustments to algorithmic settings, deep data mining (offline user clustering), and multivariate optimization of creative elements. |
Management Layer
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Admin Services | User/Account Management services, user-level permissioning, client-level white-labeling, and configuration services for external feeds, Platform Engine and optimization settings. |
| Asset Management | AK Asset Management manages the ingestion and usage of clients' assets (graphical assets, user data files, and item meta-data) via incremental or full feed ingestion and custom field mapping logic. The assets can be mapped to audiences, site traffic, or campaigns/creatives. |
| Audience Management | AK Audience Management provides the ability to define and distribute custom, granular, and targetable audiences via container tags (i.e. fire managed pixels and tags). The module accurately logs detailed audit data and counts unique users collected, distributed, and reached. |
| Campaign Management | AK Campaign Management provides the ability to define campaigns, packages, creatives, creative slots, creative assets, inventory purchases, inventory placements, ad tags, and creative decisioning logic. |
| Report Management | AK Report Management provides the ability to request reports, schedule reports, and bookmark modified reports for later retrieval. |
The powerful AK Platform is easy to deploy. All it requires is a one-time deployment setup and its ready to 'go live.' Click here for a detailed look at the deployment time line.
In This Section
Learn about AK technology and what makes it unique
AK Media Intelligence Platform Technology
A Walk-Through of the Technology
The analytics and tracking platform forms the backbone of all advertising operations. First and foremost, the platform provides the plumbing infrastructure to route, process, aggregate, log, store, and report on billions of events per day, with industry-defining transparency and granularity. Everything else comes next.