General Q&A

Q. Does Promoted do search ranking or ads ranking?
We do both! We are ads engineers from Facebook, Google, and Pinterest. It turns out that really good performance ad tech is also extremely good at optimizing for organic marketplace sales, too. You can use us for just ads if you want, though. We do unified ads and search ranking to increase your TOTAL business revenue/user by +5-10% over and above what solid S&D+ads engineering teams can achieve at most public companies with online marketplaces and scaled e-commerce.

Q. Does Promoted generate its own “quality scores” and “bids” or do you use ours?
Both! We can generate our own quality scores, and we can accept any other signals and models including retrieval scores as features
https://www.promoted.ai/videos/search-feed-optimization

Q. How do you integrate?
We only do ranking, ad auction, and “whole page optimization.” You would overfetch from its existing retrieval and targeting systems for candidates. If you would like retrieval or targeting, we can support that if you would like. We typically find that it’s easier to start with ranking.

Q. How do we send data to Promoted? How do we integrate?
See this explainer video: https://www.promoted.ai/videos/integrating-promoted-ai

Q. How does billing integrate? How do we know how much to charge our advertisers?
We compute bids and prices using machine learning and an auction, and we provide that data to your billing system. We can support a daily batch or streaming if you support it. Promoted doesn’t do direct billing of your advertisers.

Q. What ad formats do you currently support?
Promoted is all server side and we support all “formats.” We have some support for video, too. We have open source client event libraries, and we can use your existing event streams. https://www.promoted.ai/client-metrics-libraries

Q. What is the estimated time to do a POC?
1 quarter. This can be faster (a few weeks), but that’s unrealistic for large engineering teams. Explainer video: https://www.promoted.ai/videos/integrating-promoted-ai

Q. Data ownership? How does that work?
All of your data and IP remains your data and IP.

Q. Are you currently working with other customers that have geo-based features?
Yes, Hipcamp, RVshare, and Riders Share

Q. Are you currently working with other customers that have intangible, time-based products similar to events?
Yes, Outschool (timeToStart is their most important feature), Upwork, and to a lesser extent Hipcamp, interestingly: https://www.hipcamp.com/journal/engineering/behind-the-scenes-using-weather-to-predict-conversion

Q. Do most customers use Promoted for 100% of ad placements, or do they do so for specific segments?
Examples:
Customer A: Ads only (performance ads and sponsored search only)
Customer B: Started with ads, but launched with Organic.
Customer C: Organic only (no ads)
Customers typically use us for all placements

Q What latency times can we expect from the Delivery API?
Typically <100ms p99. We can go to very low latencies if you need them; e.g., for Wayfair, we do multi-cloud, multi-region deployment with PSC connections and gRPCs for <60ms p99 latencies. We will deploy to your AWS region to keep latencies low; the major driver of latencies is networking across different data centers on the open internet.

[Public] Promoted Network diagrams with Captions: SOC2 - AWS-AWS Aug 2023

Q: Along with the DeliveryAPI response, are we able to see the ML prediction values output from your model so we can understand what is happening?
Yes, this is one of our specialties! You can get any prediction returned on the response, and we have a tool to generate a full report of everything delivered, not delivered, all features, all blending rules, all experiments, and all hyperparameter draws in a spreadsheet you can share, edit, and comment on with you colleagues. We use this report to debug pCTR, pCVR, and many predictions all the time!

Case study using Introspection to debug: https://engineering.outschool.com/posts/debugging-outschool-search/

Q: How do you handle Data Privacy and Compliance?

We are fully GDPR and CCPA compliant. Our GDPR local agent ID is ZF9XAE3. Most of the information you are looking for is part of our SOC2 compliance and in our Vanta trust report at https://trust.promoted.ai/
See: https://docs.promoted.ai/docs/promoted-privacy-and-security-faqs for more.