- Improved ability to meet advertising targets
- Increased ad revenue
- Boosted user engagement
- Increased efficiency by an enhanced recommendation system
The Goal
One of the most quickly growing media companies in Bulgaria approached Ontotext looking for a smart solution that would address the following goals:
- to increase user engagement on their online platforms;
- to have better control over the serving of advertisements and make them more relevant for their users.
The Challenge
Simple as they may sound, addressing both goals required a multi-faceted solution, which incorporated an ad rotation tracking system, integrated with knowledge extraction, sentiment analysis, and recommendation services.
The Solution: Semantic Technology Based Publishing Platform
To respond to the client’s needs, Ontotext implemented a solution, which performs the following tasks:
- Semantic annotation of content
- Sentiment analysis
- User-focused recommendations
- Serving relevant advertisements
All the solution’s components were customized and tuned to work with content, written in Bulgarian.
Semantic Annotation
The semantic annotation service used a knowledge base comprising Linked Open Data sources. The service wrapped a set of text analytics components, which perform information extraction over the diverse types of the client’s content – news articles, forum posts, user comments, and advertisements.
The annotation served two purposes:
- Performed automatic tagging of the articles written by journalists
- Provided the fundamental extraction used by the other services in the stack
Sentiment Analysis
The sentiment service analyzes the users’ comments and aims to provide insights about their attitude towards the mentioned concepts, topics, and products – both in the referred content and their own comments. The sentiment analysis provides important feedback for the ad recommendation service as well. For example, the media publisher didn’t want to show an advertisement for a product that the client clearly disliked.
Recommendation Services
A crucial part of the solution is user-focused recommendation services. They provide suggestions for relevant content across the client’s platforms, increasing engagement with the content across the media company’s sites. In addition, they support serving the most relevant advertisements to their users.
The recommendation services are based on a user profile model, which takes into account:
- The semantic fingerprints of the content a user has read and actively engaged with
- The content, contributed by other users that a user actively engaged with (by upvoting/downvoting)
- The advertisements a user clicks on
- The sentiment that users have expressed towards certain entities, referred to in the content they have engaged with
Ad Serving
As the client wanted to improve their control of ad serving and ads’ relevance to the users, Ontotext built a custom ad serving platform. It provides the ability to register marketing campaigns, manage banner serving zones in the websites integrated with it, and take care of meeting the rotation targets. Apart from these standard features, a key differentiator of the system is the ability to target users more relevantly, by utilizing the user-focused recommendation services. By integrating the ad serving with these recommendations, which know about the users’ interests, preferences, and sentiments about specific concepts, Ontotext achieved more relevant user targeting. As a result, the algorithm took into account not only the rotation targets for the ad but also calculated the proximity of a user profile to the ad’s content. Based on this semantic analysis, the system could select an advertisement from several candidates for a banner zone and match the media readers with the most relevant ads.
Business Benefits
- Improved recommendation system thanks to knowing more about content and users
- Boosted user engagement
- Better achieved advertising targets
- Increased ad revenue
Why Choose Ontotext?
Ontotext’s solution for smarter recommendations and ad serving enabled the media publisher to minimize costs, increase efficiency, and improve user experience.
