Customer Success Story: Admetricks
Who is Admetricks?
Admetricks is a web application that provides competitive intelligence data for advertising agencies, publishers, and brands. The company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Santiago, Chile, where a tight-knit group of around 30 employees works towards increasing the clarity and transparency of online advertising.
The company is a staple in the Latin American market and in Spain. Despite its small size and young age, Admetricks is already responsible for providing first-rate advertising intelligence services for businesses in over 18 countries.
Their Project
In a dynamic market such as online advertising, it is essential that companies have access to updated and clear information about the latest trends and opportunities in order to make better investment and strategy decisions.
Admetricks monitors online media and advertising in order to provide highly specialized data to its clients. The company works in two areas of advertising: traditional online campaigns and social media. Its solution gathers data such as how much other companies are spending on campaigns, impact, and share of voice rates, campaign verification, medium, type of company, size, and category. For social media, the information gathered will include interaction rates. The data is processed to generate predictive analyses that help businesses develop their own advertising strategies.
The information provided will benefit their three types of clients in different ways. Advertising agencies can use predictions to develop optimized sales pitches. Publishers can identify new potential clients, find out how much they are investing elsewhere, and adapt their offers accordingly. In their turn, brands can rely on Admetricks to track their competitors’ campaigns. With the results, they are able to create their own strategies.
Their Solution
Under the hood, the process of data mining requires a sound infrastructure. “If you look at it from a technical point of view, we are a data factory. Basically, we create our own data product by gathering raw data from multiple sources, bringing it all together, processing it, and using the result to make predictions for our customers” explains Patricio del Sol CTO and co-founder. “We use a lot of computing power” adds Victor Rojas, Technology Chief.
Admetricks discovered Scaleway while searching for an alternative to their previous provider, who was no longer able to guarantee the hardware stability necessary for their set-up of 500 instances. When he stumbled upon the legacy START instance offers, Mr. Rojas found that their configuration was the perfect match for their software. The competitive pricing of the instances helped to seal the deal.
They currently have over 1300 instances set up in a cluster, which is managed with Nomad, running software that performs data acquisition tasks (web scraping). Since the data is collected from different countries, a Load Balancer is used to distribute traffic between two HAProxy servers that, in their turn, distribute traffic between multiple servers to endpoints in 18 countries.
The collected data is saved in S3 (AWS) and processed. Some analytics processes are performed using ElasticSearch hosted on a managed cluster in Digital Ocean. The data is made available to clients via a web platform and is also available in a report format, which is downloadable via API, Excel, and PDF.
Given their low headcount, Admetricks relies on a multi-cloud infrastructure to automate DevOps as much as possible. “We pick providers based on specific requirements. For different usages, we use different providers. We use some clouds because of specific services, like self-managed services, such as ElasticSearch or Databases. We prefer to be as automated as possible”.
Scaleway’s Asset
As well as being highly satisfied with Scaleway’s instances and pricing, Admetricks is also happy to be able to count on the Scaleway developer tools, such as the CLI and API, to perform bulk deployment tasks. The API is useful to Admetricks’ developers when they need to create 100+ instances in a short period of time, for example. All they need to do is use an image for the creation and replicate it.
“At Scaleway the price is very competitive, but we’re also quite happy with the developers, they’re high level in terms of the CLI and the API. There are powerful tools available. In that sense, Scaleway is a lot better than other alternatives in the same price point” discloses Daniel Valenzuela, Data Capture Engineer.
As far as future projects go, the teams are testing the new instances in the Scaleway ecosystem, such as General Purpose, and trying different configurations to be able to benefit from higher performance rates in certain parts of the architecture.