Grapeshot has elastic control over ad impression volumes, as it decides in real-time how both pages and users get categorised into ad channels.

Most publishers work hard to apply categories to articles at the time the journalist writes them. This pre-production pre-occupation means each page has a rigid set of categories, defined within an editorial taxonomy, or set of sections, defined at that time. It means categories are fixed and inflexible.

When publishers hard-wire their editorial output into several baskets of content - they create a fixed view of categories and segments their ad sales team can sell. Ad impression volumes are based on the frequency of page views in each of these segments.

So Ad Sales teams are often at the mercy of both what the journalists write and how the editorial sections are organised. If the category segments, or channels, are fixed, the Ad Sales have little control to prioritise segments or define new ones.

When Grapeshot categories a page or user in real-time, it calculates a significance score for each channel category. This is a number that shows the quality of the match based on the weights of several key words that created an overlap of conceptual match, between the page, the user and the channel category definitions.

Each channel category competes to be the most relevant to each page or user.

Ad sales teams can manipulate the score at which a channel is matched, relative to another channel - and therefore provide a boost to some channels. Rather like the hi-fi graphic equalizer, ad sales teams can control the Grapeshot Throttle to determine how different channel categories work against each other - competing to be the most relevant channel that gets sent downstream into the ad server (for example DoubleClick, Helios IQ, Atlas).

Grapeshot's real-time categorisation means the Grapeshot Throttle can take immediate effect - and Grapeshot delivers a simple user interface to control the elasticity of each category, and hence ad channel, defined.

Our experience is that many people within a publisher are interestedin ad impression volumes - not just Ad Operations! Grapeshot Throttle provides a real-time tool to manage different channels defined and controlled by Grapeshot.

Simple controls and a publisher dashboard now give a wider commercial team the same simple interface to understand what has happened during the week and month, and what they can do during the month to make sure every channel campaign meets its impression targets.

Grapeshot Throttle controls the volume of channel categories sent through to the Ad server and replaces a manual or fixed category in the ad tag with the variable virtual ones defined by Grapeshot every time the page is viewed.