Starting today, the ShopLocal team is proud to announce a much improved way of supporting our partners and retailers that use one or more of ShopLocal’s active APIs. Instead of sending members of our development community overwhelming 100+ pages of technical API documentation, the team will now be granting access to an online Wiki style site called the ShopLocal Developer Center.
If you are a current development partner or in the process of evaluating a ShopLocal API, please send an email to apisupport@shoplocal.com and someone from the team will get you setup with the required access.
The ShopLocal Developer Center promises always on access, an up-to-date and accurate set of technical API documentation for all the the various ShopLocal APIs that is rich with examples and easy to navigate and use.
The vision of the ShopLocal Developer Center is to hold a developer’s hand when first being introduced to a ShopLocal API so as to make it easier for them to develop their own unique applications with these powerful web services ShopLocal offers. With this goal in mind, the team has added some additional resources to the ShopLocal Developer Center that were never previously available which include:
- API Examples – sample iPhone and Banner ad application with more examples coming soon
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) based on real world usage from ShopLocal’s own Client Services group
- Data Dictionary – to define ShopLocal nomenclature that is foreign to an external user, e.g. what a listing means, interest threshold exposure, etc.
The team also spent some serious time in revamping the technical documentation for the following APIs:
- SmartDelivery API (SDAPI)
- SmartBrand API (SBAPI)
- ShopLocal CrossRetailer API (SCRAPI)
- Local Offer Management System API (LOMSAPI)
Each API method for all of the APIs above now contains complete and standardized information including a:
- Short description of the API call (method) and how it can be used
- Required parameters
- Conditional parameters
- Optional parameters
- URL example to show the syntax of correctly constructed API call
- Data outputs (fields that are returned by call)
- Data output example (XML return examples)
Akamai Technologies, Inc. today announced the results of an independent performance assessment of its IP location service conducted by Gomez, Inc. The Akamai IP location service provides a range of insight for content providers about an Internet end user’s geographic location including country, state, city, zip code, area code, as well as device type, connection type, and actual connection speed, among others.
ShopLocal for many years has relied heavily upon Akamai's content distribution network (CDN) for site and media caching as well as their great GeoIP targeting services.
Results from the Gomez audit show that Akamai achieved 100 percent accuracy – providing an exact match for every IP address – at the country level on a global scale, and at the state and city level within the U.S. Akamai also achieved 97.22 percent accuracy when determining IP addresses at the city level across the globe.
Akamai customers leverage its IP location service for multiple use cases, including:
- Marketing – create a personalized end-user experience by delivering geographically-targeted information, such as language, pricing, advertising, shipping instructions
- Fraud Protection – identify patterns for proxy hijacking of banking and retail transactions
- Mobile Device Detection – tailor content based on end users’ device
- Rights Management / Compliance – comply with the digital rights of licensed content and meet regulatory compliance restrictions on software downloads
- Security – monitor access to corporate networks
“ShopLocal uses Akamai to identify, by IP address, the location from which an end user is accessing our site,” said Edward McLaughlin, Senior Director of Technology at ShopLocal. “This technology has been instrumental for us to automatically present content and localized promotions best suited for the location of our Client’s end users. Our Client’s customers expect a very personalized experience, so the accuracy of Akamai’s IP location data is paramount to the success of their online offerings.”
“Our Clients that leverage automatic IP location data see a 13 percent increase in conversion rate of first-time visitors compared to clients that require their first-time visitors to provide their location by entering their zip code manually,” said Loch Rose, Vice President of Analytics at ShopLocal.
To learn more about the Gomez audit click here.
Loch Rose, head of analytics here at ShopLocal, wrote up an overview of what is easier and more difficult as it pertains to optimization within rich media display ads. It was great, so I’d like to share it.
To get to that elusive point where every possible content variation is mapped to
The difficult challenges in optimization:
- Optimizing based on user level data (e.g., BT data) as it can be very diverse, contain many missing values, and all of the related publisher-specific integration challenges.
- Optimizing for a combination of listings, e.g., selecting the best several listings (can only be solved via a 2-phase process, e.g. first optimizing by category, then by listing within category).
- Combining rules/constraints with optimization, e.g. for rich media, jointly optimizing the banner and the panel by selecting the best listings for the expanded panel that are consistent with the content of the unexpanded banner.
- Setup integration which encompasses incorporating multiple data feeds and creative elements.
- Optimizing around goal orientated performance metrics due to the overwhelming amounts of data to crunch through complex models. This requires efficient coding and/or a sample-based approach (i.e. only crunching a subset of the overall available data).
- Getting all of the mechanics to work which involves serving all of the experiments (e.g., permutations) and then serving storytelling up the experiments that were more successful, in near-real time.
- Providing comprehensive measurement and reporting, including reporting on how the optimization itself is working.
What’s not so difficult in optimization:
- Optimizing on advertiser-controlled variables such as creative types and list of publisher.
- Optimizing for a single listing.
- Overall campaign tracking.
For this first of few behind the scenes looks, we will be looking at a few of the main tools and services that the ShopLocal infrastructure team uses to ensure high availability and performance of all the various public web applications / sites that ShopLocal hosts.
The goal of this series is to give clients & partners a better, more complete understanding of all the areas that ShopLocal provides value across. In other words, for every dollar of client / partner revenue that comes in, some portion of that dollar goes to fund the world-class infrastructure that ShopLocal brings to all clients / partners. The internal team takes great pride in this set of systems, as it is not some low-budget, “server room in the office closet type start-up data center”, loosely managed, afterthought. Rather it is a best-of breed solution that is leveraging partnerships with the leaders in each respective field.
At a summary level this post will examine how ShopLocal uses:
- Keynote - An external, 3rd party availability and performance monitoring that is done from an end user perspective
- Akamai - One of the largest and most powerful content distribution networks (CDN) that ShopLocal heavily uses to cache and distribute web site content
- Rackspace - A top leader in dedicated, fully-supported web hosting / data center that also provides a powerful set of server health monitoring and remote admin controls
Keynote - Performance and Availability
- By being a 3rd party, this brings real time objectivity to any client / partner feedback and reported issues
- Configured as a proactive monitoring solution that has many levels of alerts and escalation setup to warn internal team members of potential and/or real issues
- Keynote offers the broadest and most representative set of test infrastructure which help cast the “net” as wide as possible. OS, browser type, network location, type of ISP, type of connection, geography, etc are all tested simultaneously
- Global measurement network across multiple locations and backbones gives a very broad perspective
- 2400+ measurement computers and mobile devices in 240 locations provide extensive reach and depth to measurements
- Accurate, realistic view of the end user experience. This is the most important point. Everything Keynote does is done from this user perspective. Most IT infrastructures have plenty of internal, non-user perspective monitors of server health, performance, uptime etc from WITHIN their data center / firewall. But these really only provide a very limited and often false picture of what true everyday users experience
This is a real (blinded to protect the identity of the eight ShopLocal SmartCircular retail clients) sample daily level (so hourly) report from Keynote that measures site performance across on average around ~950 data points per retailer
Akamai – EdgePlatform Content Distribution Network (CDN)
- Extensively used by ShopLocal , especially on all of the highest traffic sites and web applications
- Highly custom content synchronization process has bee built out to ensure the timely scheduling, caching, flushing and release of web content to the public
- Handles all ShopLocal hosted content images across all clients
- Is the largest CDN on the planet with well over 48,000 servers in the cloud and located within over 1,000 of the worlds networks
- Provides broad global coverage with numerous strategically located data centers in over 70 countries
- Creates the capability of being able to handle any and all incoming web traffic on an OnDemand basis. So unexpected surges or spikes in traffic are seamlessly absorbed by Akamai
- Provides real time bandwidth and request error reporting to hep monitor all inbound traffic
Currently consuming over 85,000,000 MB of bandwidth from Akamai in May 2009. The rest of 2009 is a projection that is constantly being re-forecasted as time progresses.
Over the three (3) years that ShopLocal has been using Akamai, we have become more and more reliant upon them as evidenced by the strong growth rates. The biggest part however of this growth is the really just the general public's ever growing demand for online circular information. There are just more users coming to the ShopLocal hosted weekly ad site than ever before.
Rackspace – Managed & Dedicated Web Hosting
- One of the top leaders consistently in hosting providers
- Employs an “N+1″ style of disaster recovery for key areas such as HVAC, power, network and equipment. “N+1″ means that there exists at least one additional unit that is normally not needed for regular operation but would be used if any one of the other units malfunctions
- Utilizes an extensive, multi-level security framework that includes for example a hardened and physically secure facility, dual dedicated firewall devices in front of all ShopLocal systems, no ad hoc dial-in capability into the production servers exists, proactive implementation of all recommended security patches, including anti-virus definition files, PGP (public/private key) encryption for the storage and transfer of some types of content / data, etc…
- Ensures that all production systems and related data are backed up daily
- Provides a dedicated support team to ShopLocal account
- Has developed many ShopLocal specific processes and SLAs developed over the the course of this long term partnership
- Extends 24×7x365 live support
- Constantly reviewing dashboard & threshold based monitoring of both network, hardware and system devices
- Committed to immediate response to emergency support tickets
- Offers top level certifications such as Microsoft gold certified partner
- Employees over 60+ Microsoft certified professionals many with additional Microsoft certifications
Here is a screenshot Cacti, of one of many different monitoring tools that ShopLocal and/or Rackspace uses. Others include Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) & Site Catalyst. Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool (which is the OpenSource industry standard, high performance data logging and graphing system for time series data) that stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database.
So in today’s WSJ there was a rather fitting article titled,
Look at This Article. It’s One of Our Most Popular
Top-Ten Lists Abound Online, but Following the Herd Can Make You Wonder About the Wisdom of Crowds
By CARL BIALIK
In it the author makes the point that when a site publishes a “most popular” list, that this type of presentation actually distorts the overall ranking, because the perception of popularity alters users’ behavior. For some entertaining examples, read the complete story. This in general makes sense. By showing lists or result sets ranked by popularity, the site is to some extent creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The items at the top of the popular list will ONLY continue to become even more popular and thus remain at the top of the list by the very fact that they are first.
Companies need to be careful and take the necessary precautions when creating and using crowd sourced popularity so as to not create bias and affect consumer preferences
However, ShopLocal’s own Wisdom of Crowds methodology does not suffer from this problem. This is because the presentation of content within the SmartCircular sites is not affected by the Wisdom of Crowds ranking (e.g. it is not used currently for things like result set sorting order), that this ShopLocal generated popularity data (WoC) is an unbiased measurement of user preference.
Since one of the current near-term road map items for SmartCircular 4.1 sites is to begin consuming and using this popularity-based rankings in areas such as category, brand and keyword search result pages, the ShopLocal team will make sure to exclude any user responses to featured offers from the Wisdom of Crowds ranking so as to keep this problem highlighted in the WSJ article above from occurring.
Special thanks to our own Loch Rose for pointing this fun read out and doing the initial analysis.
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