Who is DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify (DV) provides digital ad verification that helps brands improve the effectiveness of their online advertising, giving them clarity and confidence in their digital investment. DV authenticates media quality, detects advertising fraud, and powers performance for the world’s largest brands, platforms and publishers. Hundreds of companies turn to DV for their industry-leading technology and data, and industry-leading customer service. DV offers solutions across every major vertical, including financial services, telecom, automotive, retail, CPG, travel, luxury, pharmaceuticals. DV offers pre-bid and post-bid
Miki Noam, DV’s Director of Infrastructure, said, “Our goal is to give advertisers real insight into what their ads are doing, both before and after bidding for an ad. We provide monitoring, reporting visibility, and other business information that is very crucial for their business and for their placement of ads, and management of their ad budget.”
A Low Latency Service Delivery Network
To deliver its solutions, DV maintains a significant network consisting of colocation-based data centers positioned in top global media-buying markets that host the applications that respond to real-time advertiser requests. These data centers must handle a massive and growing load of requests. Between 2019 and 2021, advertiser requests have more than doubled from five to eleven billion per day.
Low latency response to advertiser verification requests is critical. “From the moment a user visits a website, an ad that is part of a targeted campaign has to be delivered and its back-end reporting data recorded within 200 milliseconds,” said Noam. “Within that 200-millisecond budget, DV has only 8 milliseconds to deliver the verification information needed by automated advertiser decision systems. Every single one of the billions of transactions we handle can have a positive or negative impact on the ad-serving process, so low latency is pretty much key to our customers’ success.”
DV also utilizes public cloud infrastructure to host internal management systems and tools that ensure consistent data replication across all data centers.
The Need for Network Agility
DV data centers are highly connected in order to receive and respond to advertiser request traffic, as well as manage distributed application and infrastructure components. DV utilizes a mix of backbone links between data centers, Internet transit, cloud connectivity, and Internet Exchange (IX) providers. While the DV infrastructure team has extensive experience in building and managing a high-performance network, one of the chief challenges they continued to meet was maintaining network agility in the face of constantly changing customer needs and market demands.
Noam commented, “On the pre-bid side of our business, clients are continuously optimizing and tuning their infrastructure and organization, and launching new campaigns that need different advertising footprints from a geographical or market point of view. So we have to quickly respond in order to be able to satisfy the demand for visibility where and when they need it. On the post-bid side, we’re gathering information from end-users that are actually viewing those advertisements and gaining all of the insights from their experiences, so again we have to be ready to handle that volume. On top of that, there’s a definite seasonal effect to various clients’ advertising, so we have to accommodate those demand shifts as well. ”
The challenge for DV was that traditional telecom services can take weeks to months to provision, and require long-term fixed contracts. Both of these characteristics rob agility from the network infrastructure.
“At the end of the day, it’s a time-to-market issue,” said Noam. “We needed a far more flexible and responsive way to get bandwidth where and when we needed to make our customers successful.”
Building a More Responsive Network with PacketFabric
DV has deployed PacketFabric services for data center to data center, data center to cloud, and data center to Internet Exchange connectivity.
Charles Gucker, DV’s Senior Network Engineer, explained, “I have a very long history in the industry, and had gotten to know the founders of PacketFabric and used their services. So when I joined DV about a year and a half ago, it was a great opportunity because DV needed the flexibility, availability, and responsiveness that PacketFabric provides.”
PacketFabric made an immediate impact for a rapidly growing customer in the New York area. “We had started this customer with usage-billed IP transit connectivity, but as their traffic volume took off, we needed to transition them to a dedicated 100Gbps connection,” said Gucker. “Traditional telco services would have easily taken six to eight weeks, but with PacketFabric it was instantaneous.”
PacketFabric’s extensive network footprint and ecosystem means that DV can easily expand connectivity to geographies where customers or partners are located. Gucker added, “We actually just turned up a service from PacketFabric where we extended our reach to IX provider DE-CIX’s Dallas location to reach an organization that we partner and do a lot of collective reporting with.”
Delivering Superior User Experience and Business Impact
PacketFabric empowers DV with speed and efficiency by enabling the infrastructure team to interact with the entire service portfolio in an automated, API-driven fashion.
“We’ve seen a huge impact, especially in regards to flexibility,” said Noam. “As we see growth in either the pre-bid or post-bid side of the business, or as we see a specific product that is gaining popularity, we’re able to rapidly adapt our infrastructure for it. And sometimes that flexibility means we can capitalize on opportunities, like the time we had a new customer that generated a ridiculously high demand for bandwidth.”
“Working with PacketFabric meant that we could simply access that bandwidth-on-demand, rather than making a major capital investment.”
Charles Gucker, Senior Network Engineer at DoubleVerify
“Efficiency isn’t just about the network infrastructure,” added Gucker. “PacketFabric allows us to maintain a nimble team, where we’re not sitting waiting for months-long processes to complete. We can react and be responsive to customers and partners in an extremely timely fashion.”
Noam concluded, “The flexibility that PacketFabric provides has become an important part of making our network always ready to deliver the best user experience to our customers, with maximum market responsiveness.”
To learn more about DoubleVerify, please visit https://doubleverify.com/.