Sulvo Harnesses Cloudflare to Increase Advertising Integrity Across the Digital Marketplace

Sulvo Harnesses Cloudflare to Increase Advertising Integrity Across the Digital Marketplace

Sulvo is one of the web’s leading patented programmatic ad servers, serving tens of billions of impressions every month. The server offers unique, revenue-balancing UX technology and full compliance with IAB and Google’s SEO and ad quality guidelines.

As part of its aim to improve impression quality and trust in the programmatic advertising industry, Sulvo recently moved its platform to Cloudflare, enabling it to take advantage of Cloudflare’s powerful security features, including industry-leading Bot Management.

Background

While programmatic advertising allows publishers to monetize traffic by selling ad space, advertisers are not only buying impressions — they are also buying trust. Trust that an impression is an actual visitor, and not a bot, is critical to advertisers and publishers and for the long term health of the industry.

The Problem

According to most reports, bad bots account for a significant portion of the traffic routed across the Internet. This represents a real problem for publishers aiming to sell quality impressions, advertisers aiming to buy human impressions, and an entire industry that has fixed per-impression costs regardless of traffic type.

Advertisers end up having to build lowered pricing into their buying strategies to account for bot traffic, and also must absorb any other fixed per-impression costs. Publishers are paying to serve pages and ads to visitors that are not real, risking future ad earnings if their bot traffic increases — a threat that they have little control over.

Sulvo has been working to find solutions to this issue for over 2 years, with results that were usually too slow for the requirements of the programmatic media industry.

“Before using Cloudflare we were simply in the dark, we had no idea about the percentage of bots our infrastructure was receiving or if we needed to take action to protect our publisher partners’ interests against malicious traffic.”

- Romeo Ju President, Sulvo

The Cloudflare Solution

It was not until partnering with Cloudflare that Sulvo found a viable solution that did not negatively impact user experience and would be able to respond fast enough for use within programmatic auctions for digital media. Based on their experiments, Cloudflare’s bot management solution performs 100-300% faster than alternatives, making it the clear choice in these scenarios.

Cloudflare enables these benefits with technical simplicity, as publishers don’t need to add additional tags to their pages.

Using Cloudflare’s bot-protection technology, Sulvo has been able to improve the integrity of the programmatic advertising industry, bringing more confidence from advertisers by utilizing the Sulvo ad server. Finding the right balance in scanning billions of impressions for bots without impacting UX, identifying bots correctly, lowering bot ad traffic, and using this data to lower invalid activity risk, is not something either company could have done alone.

“Cloudflare’s bot blocking has improved our reputation as an enterprise ad server both in the eyes of programmatic advertisers and in the eyes of the digital media publishers — essentially making us stronger on both sides of the marketplace.

The numbers speak for themselves: we've seen an over 100% increase in decisioning speed and an average of 50% reduction on invalid activity for the sellers.” - Romeo Ju President, Sulvo