Where is the money: look for advertising (and competitors)
The other day we launched WEBO Bubbler - a very cool addition to our usual technology monitoring : we learned how to take screenshots of sites from anywhere in Russia and to track advertising banners on these screenshots. For starters: this is what Samsung ads look like on the main Yandex from Novosibirsk.
First, you can make a screenshot of any site from (almost) any city in Russia. Now it is limited only by the size of our network (more than 20 points in Russia), so soon almost all cities with a population of more than 500 thousand will enter there (i.e., those with normal Internet access). You can check the correctness of your geo-tagging for users, as well as track many other points.
Secondly, what is more important for the service, you can find a specific banner on a given page of the advertising platform from a specific region. For advertising agencies, this is a very demanded functionality.
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Thirdly, what is more important for brands, you can track the advertising of competitors at leading sites and estimate the advertising budget roughly (knowing the frequency of displaying banners, the daily reach of the audience and the time of the advertising campaign).
There are two modes of operation: taking a single screenshot from cities of Russia or countries of the world - you just need to go to the WEBO Bubbler main page, enter the site address and select regions or countries.
In the second mode - tracking ads - you need to first load the banner that you need to find in the screenshot, then enter the address of the site and select the cities for which you need to track it. As soon as the necessary screenshot is received (the frequency of displaying the banner is at least 1%), a screenshot will appear in the service interface. All graphic formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF) and Flash are now supported. We plan to add TGB and social media accounts to track ads there.
Taking a screenshot for a long time is not a problem, there are a huge number of services that do it. To place such a service in the region is also not very difficult: you just need to rent a site from a hosting provider. Much more interesting, how the ad banner is determined by the given. Especially if it is a dynamic banner.
Since all the screenshots are taken in PNG, we can simply compare two images with great accuracy: an advertising banner and a loaded page of the site. Selecting graphic blocks is also quite a trivial task (for example, it is well-written here ). The action algorithm is quite simple: we need to remove a sufficiently large number of states of a dynamic banner (for example, every 100ms), and then compare each of them with a suitable graphic area in the screenshot. If there is a large image match, the banner is considered to be found
The combination of all these elements and is the essence of the service: for a completely symbolic money, you can know exactly whether a given advertisement is shown in a given region.
Screenshots of the Samsung advertising campaign on the Yandex main page from Russian regions.
What is the point?
First, you can make a screenshot of any site from (almost) any city in Russia. Now it is limited only by the size of our network (more than 20 points in Russia), so soon almost all cities with a population of more than 500 thousand will enter there (i.e., those with normal Internet access). You can check the correctness of your geo-tagging for users, as well as track many other points.
Secondly, what is more important for the service, you can find a specific banner on a given page of the advertising platform from a specific region. For advertising agencies, this is a very demanded functionality.
')
Thirdly, what is more important for brands, you can track the advertising of competitors at leading sites and estimate the advertising budget roughly (knowing the frequency of displaying banners, the daily reach of the audience and the time of the advertising campaign).
How it works?
There are two modes of operation: taking a single screenshot from cities of Russia or countries of the world - you just need to go to the WEBO Bubbler main page, enter the site address and select regions or countries.
In the second mode - tracking ads - you need to first load the banner that you need to find in the screenshot, then enter the address of the site and select the cities for which you need to track it. As soon as the necessary screenshot is received (the frequency of displaying the banner is at least 1%), a screenshot will appear in the service interface. All graphic formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF) and Flash are now supported. We plan to add TGB and social media accounts to track ads there.
Technology
Taking a screenshot for a long time is not a problem, there are a huge number of services that do it. To place such a service in the region is also not very difficult: you just need to rent a site from a hosting provider. Much more interesting, how the ad banner is determined by the given. Especially if it is a dynamic banner.
Since all the screenshots are taken in PNG, we can simply compare two images with great accuracy: an advertising banner and a loaded page of the site. Selecting graphic blocks is also quite a trivial task (for example, it is well-written here ). The action algorithm is quite simple: we need to remove a sufficiently large number of states of a dynamic banner (for example, every 100ms), and then compare each of them with a suitable graphic area in the screenshot. If there is a large image match, the banner is considered to be found
The combination of all these elements and is the essence of the service: for a completely symbolic money, you can know exactly whether a given advertisement is shown in a given region.
Living example
Screenshots of the Samsung advertising campaign on the Yandex main page from Russian regions.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/175873/
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