In order to provide our users with fun and educational content that is both accessible and free, we currently work with third-party advertisers. Maintaining a balance between advertisements and an exceptional (and secure) on-site experience for our users is incredibly important to us and we are constantly looking at ways that we can improve how the two interact. That’s where GeoEdge comes in.
Our Managing Director, Cormac O’Nolan, worked closely with GeoEdge—a premier provider of ad security—to protect the integrity of our sites and secure a quality experience for our users.
Finding solutions
Providing a positive user experience is crucially important for us. It means that our users are not only happy with our products but are also willing to return to our site and to share our content with their friends, which means we can gain more users organically.
"We faced a problem: our Facebook campaigns had some bad ads"
A while ago however, we faced a problem: our Facebook campaigns had some bad ads—some of them had a script that re-directed our users to other web pages. Users wrote comments, complaining about being re-directed. Back then, we didn’t really have a way to detect such ad activity and we only knew that this was happening because users were sharing their feedback on our social media platforms or messaging us directly. That’s when we decided to start looking for a solution and found GeoEdge.
Who are GeoEdge and how does their solution work for us?
GeoEdge offers ad security software, which blocks poor quality ads, fraudulent redirects, and helps block third-party advertising payment scams. The software monitors content on our pages, detects the ads, checks them, and blocks some of them if necessary.
GeoEdge provides us with a dashboard where we can view ads by advertising partners and see user experience issues and security issues (such as automatic redirects). For example, we can see that in the last 7 days GeoEdge scanned around 10 million site impressions. The software checks the code of the ads and detects certain commands within them that provoke bad behavior. It also checks ad images to ensure that no inappropriate content is shared with users.
We know that sometimes there are some bad things happening within the advertisement industry and it is our goal to protect our users from this, by scanning ads and blocking them when we need to.
Thanks to GeoEdge, we can set which kinds of ads we would like to have and which ads we would like to block based on their code, copy, and images. The software detects the topic of each ad and while some are blocked directly, others are marked for us to review. We then track these ads in case we would like to block them in the future. Based on the data we see, we continuously evaluate our advertising partners to review their performance, their trustworthiness, and ultimately to decide whether we continue working with them.
Since we have implemented GeoEdge, the number of complaints decreased dramatically, we have improved the overall safety of our site, and our users can now enjoy hours of educational and fun content without annoying ad experiences.
You can read more about our work with GeoEdge or see their good work in action on our GimmeMore site.