“I love false alarms” said no one ever. I would like to share some exciting news today. Last week we finished the rollout of our Spike/Drop alerts feature. Some of you may have seen previous versions of it on the dashboard but now we have compiled all customer feedback. It may sound like a generic feature but we spent quite some time developing and perfecting it. So the real reason to get excited here is:
- Alerts done right with no false alarms
- Let the machine handle what you can’t – monitor thousands of data points
Who needs alerts anyway?
Let’s say you have 5 apps, each one is monetized by 5 networks using both interstitials and rewarded videos over 2 platforms and you have an audience in 20 meaningful countries. Quick math shows you that you have to track 2,000 data points on a daily basis if you want to know if you experienced a CPM drop on one of them and 2,000 more if you want to also monitor a drop in impressions per day. That can be very time-consuming.
Spike/Drop alerts to the rescue
With SOOMLA’s new feature, you can set up alerts for various KPIs so monitoring is done on your behalf. You can spend your time and effort in other areas while knowing that you will receive a notification if one of the KPIs drops in somewhere in the world.
Monitoring thousands of data points is easy with the “breakdown” option. If you don’t set it, you will just be monitoring the aggregated average CPM across all countries, networks, and ad types. However, if you do set it up, you will receive a notification about a drop in each breakdown.
The biggest enemy – false alarms
This is probably the part we are most proud of. Our data science team worked hard to great a system that excels in all these fronts:
- Detects spikes/drops
- Eliminates false positives (this is fancy language for false alarms)
- Is easy to comprehend and tweak by the customer
After running simulations on hundreds of customer scenarios the clear winner was a “watermark” system where the platform “remebers” the lowest point over a the last 7 days (or another period the customer selects) and if the value falls beneath it to a new low the alert will go out. On top of that we added a customizable sensitivity buffer that defaults to 20% but can be configured by the customer as well.
And needless to say, the same system can be used to detect spikes as well.
Options to support your scale
If you have a portfolio of apps, you can also choose to have the alerts apply to all your apps, just a few of them or a single one best on your selection. Many of our customers haven dozens of apps and configuring alerts for each one of them would be highly time consuming. Apart from the option to configure alerts on the account level there is also an option to upload an alerts list. One of our customers have configured 3,000 alerts like that.
Finally, you can set up the alerts to shoot not just over email but also as slack messages so you can have a team handle them but at the same time not spam everyone on the team.
Some other cool alerts
Spike/drop alerts are very exciting but there are also other type of alerts that may come in handy. We also offer:
- Advertiser watchlist – Get notified when a specific advertiser from your list shows up in your app
- Category watchlist – You can also ‘watch’ an entire category that you feel is competitive to your app
- Content rating alerts – If your game has younger audiences you may want to know about advertisers that have “mature” or “adult” content rating
These are highly useful for customers who tightly manage ad quality and these alerts also work hand in hand with our Ad Quality screen so you can see what the violating ads look like.
