Ad Reporting for an Interactive TV Gaming Channel

ANKHOR FlowSheet was successfully used to build an ad reporting solution for a customer offering an interactive television gaming channel. The result is a fast and cost-effective implementation for analyzing and visualizing unstructured and semi-structured data in the form of log files comprised of more than 10 million lines of text per day, and connecting this with information retrieved from several other types of data sources (SQL, SOAP). ANKHOR Flowheet’s intuitive and visual approach provides the necessary flexibility required by the customer to adapt to steadily changing requirements. Our customer is finally able to get the complete picture of the channel’s usage and provide meaningful reports to their advertisers.

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“As an interactive television gaming channel (with incredible usage and advertising response rates) we found that it was incredibly difficult to collect and analyze data for our TV channel. Other solutions allowed us to analyze pieces and parts but did not give us the whole picture. With Ankhor we were able to use a single tool (the Ankhor Flowsheet) to collect the source web server log data, analyze the data and generate reports. We were also able to easily (without involving a programmer!) slice and dice our data to see it from different viewpoints. Our distribution and advertising partners consistently complemented us on our solid, detailed reports and were impressed with the level of data we were able to share with them. But the best part was that we were able to show the actual usage which led to more distribution deals. Ankhor was invaluable in helping us grow our business."

Sangita Verma

Founder and CEO

TAG Networks, Inc.

Quote From Our Customer
The Overview pane of the Dashboard displays the number of players in the channel, the games played and advertisements that were viewed. The view on the last 24 hours is a quick indicator for the current use of the channel.
Display of detailed information on the favorite games have been during a certain period of time. A fold-out heat map displays what age group preferred what types of games.
A view of which weekdays and hours saw the highest average numbers of players and the total time spent in the channel.
This chart is a visual representation of the percentage by which the ads booked by advertisers were displayed in relation to each other. It can be seen at a glance how the ad mix changed over the course of a quarter.
This Dashboard tab provides the number of unique ad impressions to registered and guest players over a selectable period of time.

The Special ANKHOR Approach

The ANKHOR based solution takes a fresh new approach to achieve the goals set by the customer compared to “traditional” Business Intelligence solutions:

Adaptable to changing requirements: ANKHOR’s visual approach to creating solutions and its natural support of component reuse significantly simplifies and accelerates the development process, driving cost down.
Provisioning of data cubes covering specific aspects: Instead of a data mart, the solution provides OLAP data cubes for download or export which offer a specific view on the original data (for example: specific data cubes with a focus on a time period, a specific application or a particular advertiser). These cubes can be used for further analysis using ANKHOR or other means.
Simplified structure for keeping data: All historic data is archived in ZIP compressed log files, avoiding the expensive maintenance of a data warehouse. New customer requirements calling for a different view on the original data are no problem: The FlowSheet simply builds new OLAP data cubes, meeting the new requirements from the original set of data. No information is lost, as would be the case when condensing the original data before it is archived.
Fast incremental processing: After processing the source data and building the OLAP data cubes for the first time, new data sets are added to the cubes in incremental steps, significantly reducing the processing time. 10 million new lines in the log files require less than 3 minutes to be processed, including the accesses to other data sources required to build the cubes.
Support for clustered processing: By splitting the source data by deployment site, month or query type, the processing load is distributed over several servers running the ANKHOR execution engine. Since it is compressed, the source data can be fully replicated on all servers of the computing cluster.
Reuse existing channels for harvesting source data: The existing infrastructure for collecting log files was reused. This avoided development cost and the need to qualify and deploy new versions of the game channel’s server software.