33Across: Five Billion Daily Events, One Near-Real-Time Dashboard

The 33Across platform helps publishers make more money from their ad space by connecting with a variety of supply-side platforms (SSPs). However, these third-party SSPs weren’t driving as much revenue as they could. 33Across needed a way to connect to demand sources directly using their own SSP in order to increase profits from 40–50 percent to 60 percent, improve user experience for client audiences, and cut the costs of third-party SSPs.

Publisher Manager, one of our solutions, had many of the features 33Across was looking for to solve its SSP challenges. We built 33Across an in-house SSP by integrating Publisher Manager into their existing infrastructure and customizing it to match their unique needs. We also built a creative audit tool to guarantee ad quality without impeding auction speed.

As we worked, we faced considerable data integration challenges, dealing with peak traffic of 20 million events per minute, which meant that reports sometimes had to process five billion rows of data. To speed up data visualization, we built a data aggregation pipeline. Within this pipeline, the most popular reports had their own custom, precalculated aggregates that contained only their own dimensions, while custom reports could tap into generalized data tables of all possible dimensions. This pipeline was deployed into a cluster of sharded databases. As a result, approximately 200 million rows per shard could be queried and visualized in less than half a second.