A constant requirement of innovative inventory has become the need of an hour for any native adtech company. Publisher acquisition team is continuously under pressure from sales and delivery departments to increase the ad inventory supply simultaneously improve on quality. Increasing inventory vertically by signing huge MGs with publishers is not a viable solution where margins are always on fire.

At Inuxu, the adgebra platform story is no different. Rohit (CEO) and Shashikant (Head of Inventory) were always at loggerheads for the very same reason.

A part of the problem was solved when we launched a self-serve platform for long tail publishers. We started onboarding a lot of publishers and a new inventory supply was growing at a steady pace but the exponentiality and quality were not as expected.

Rohit envisioned ‘Web Push Notification’ could be an interesting addition to native advertising. Push notification is a subscribed-only inventory and it displays on the user’s machine, promising 100% visibility. Such inventory quality would do wonders for advertisers on adgebra. Immediately the idea was discussed internally with me (Rajesh – CTO).

India’s largest Web Notification tech company is iZooto and coincidently Neel the Cofounder of iZooto got in touch with Rohit via LinkedIn and conversation of cross leveraging each other’s needs and strengths started. However, it was not as simple as it sounds and the whole challenge of making this merger work came to me, my tech team, and the tech team at iZooto.

What is web push Notification and how it started: A push notification is a message that is “pushed” from a backend server or application to user interface, e.g. (But not limited to) mobile applications and desktop applications. Apple was the first to introduce we push notification in 2009 and in 2010 Google released its own service, Google Cloud to Device Messaging.
How is it different: The beauty in web push notification, unlike traditional ways, is, the user need not be subscribed & active on his device, meaning there is no need for a user to be reading his favourite article on any website for an ad to be shown to him. This was kind of a gold mine and iZooto cracked it quite early by tying up with publishers and having a fantastic platform quick and ready for use of publishers.

Here are a few technical details on the marvellous Integration between iZooto and adgebra. The integration is a pure HTTPs request and the response is in JSON format that contains all the components needed to form a native ad and make one impression of Push Notification on a client’s device.

adgebra needs a lot of User details (PII excluded) for intelligent decisions in showing a relevant ad to a user based on his Geo, Site, Device, language, etc. iZooto passes on all the user and site-related parameters to adgebra and this forms targeting input to adgebra. These inputs are fed to adgebra algorithms and provide the most relevant native ads based on the input targeting parameters.

There were other challenges of security, requests through multiple servers, native image size difference, impression and click tracking, fraud clicks, etc. Each case had its own challenges and solutions were custom designed and implemented.

Currently, adgebra is serving 1mn+ requests daily from iZooto that translates to around 4K to 5K clicks.

Integration wouldn’t have been a cake walk without a great tech team at iZooto – hats off to Neel, Rohit and Sachin – Kudos guys, let’s reap the benefits!