Tapad
Founded in 2010, Tapad, Inc. empowers brands, agencies, and marketers to deliver personalized, relevant messages to vast audiences of consumers who all behave differently, use different devices, and increasingly expect personalized communications. Through its identity-driven solutions centered around the signature Tapad Graph™, Tapad helps connect millions of consumers across billions of devices, providing an accurate, privacy-safe, and unified approach to connecting with consumers across screens.
Tapad uses Catchpoint for:
- Product validation.
- Customer onboarding.
- In-depth performance insights.
- Discovering performance outliers.
- Customer empowerment.
Not only did we save money by going with proven Catchpoint synthetic monitoring, but we are also achieving better results than we could have by building a solution in house.
Problem
Tapad’s partners and customers take advantage of the company’s solutions by calling upon first- and third-party data or, in some cases, adding a marketing tag to their websites. No matter the approach, Tapad must ensure it does not negatively impact the performance of partner and customer web pages.
In addition, as part of a new product launch for a strategic customer, Tapad needed a way to effectively test different web pages and sites across different locations.
Tapad regularly delivers performance reports to clients. “We need an easy, reliable and robust way to show response times across the globe,” explains Stig Henriksen, Software Engineer, Tapad.
“More brands need to bring identity resolution in house for privacy safeguards, so we’re enabling that through a tag they add to their digital properties. As part of our mission, we need to ensure the tag performs well,” says Paweł Cejrowski, Senior Software Engineer, Tapad.
Tapad’s engineering team already conducted endpoint monitoring to measure performance from different global locations. However, since endpoint monitoring doesn’t provide insight into how Tapad tags behave in end-user browsers, this didn’t account for the end user experience.
Needing better insight into what was happening with its products in order to effectively understand the source of potential issues and more quickly address them to ensure optimal performance, Tapad began looking for an observability solution. Ultimately, they selected Catchpoint.
Solution
Tapad has deployed Catchpoint to solve a number of issues:
Active observability.
As a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customer, Tapad first considered taking advantage of GCP PCP checks. However, this approach didn’t allow Tapad to run its JavaScript code for uptime checks.
Wanting both active observability and browser-based tests, Tapad contemplated building an in-house solution but quickly discarded the idea.
“Such a solution is tremendously complex. It would have taken months, if not years, to fulfill our needs,” Cejrowski says.
According to Cejrowski, Tapad was immediately sold on Catchpoint’s active observability for end user performance measurement once the team saw the demo. “Catchpoint supports integration of the JavaScript that powers our tags and makes it easy to create tests programmatically.”
In fact, Catchpoint helped the Tapad team automate the test creation process using REST APIs. “Catchpoint’s solutions engineer was extremely helpful and saved us significant time on API discovery,” continues Cejrowski.
Product validation.
Tapad also turned to Catchpoint to measure performance throughout the development process for its newest service. Running tests in its production environment helps Tapad’s engineers optimize performance before release. The team can also use Catchpoint to monitor product performance after release – for this and the company’s other offerings – by seeing the real-time user journey. This helps Tapad ensure it is meeting customer expectations and service level agreements (SLAs).
“Our customers rightfully expect us to meet certain technical requirements when it comes to response latency and the like. Using Catchpoint, we can demonstrate to our customers and ourselves that we meet those expectations,” says Henriksen.
Customer onboarding.
As it pursues new customers, Tapad uses Catchpoint web page tests for validation and assurance that its solution is as good as an incumbent or competitor. During customer onboarding, Tapad uses Catchpoint to conduct a smoke test without requiring customers to generate data.
“Active data from Catchpoint alleviates our customers of the need to provide data. We can ensure our solution works as the customer expects while also integrating them more quickly,” Henriksen says.
By tweaking the initial Catchpoint test used for onboarding, Tapad can also easily monitor ongoing performance for customers.
Granular performance insights.
Tapad’s ability to run web page tests and see dashboards and reports using Catchpoint empowers the engineering team in new ways. If the team, for instance, notices variable performance in a region, it can see a breakdown of the stages of HTTP requests, including TLS resolution and DNS lookups.
Catchpoint has also proven valuable in helping debug performance. Tapad can see how its tag or endpoint performs in the context of a web page and what is happening in that region, such as general DNS performance. In turn, Tapad can more confidently satisfy its SLAs.
“Catchpoint eliminates guesswork about how we’re performing both internally and externally. As a result, we can react quickly to performance degradations and our customers can be confident about performance,” Henriksen says.
Insight into performance outliers.
Without Catchpoint’s active observability, Tapad would not have insight into performance outliers.
“The closest we could get to end users would be at the load balancer level,” Henriksen explains.
Now, however, the engineering team can see performance all the way to end users. By gaining accurate data into performance around the world as well as a granular breakdown of variables, Tapad can more easily determine if a performance issue is caused by an outlier. In fact, it can narrow issues down to a single event.
“With Catchpoint, we aren’t just relying on a median or average. We can investigate single events and requests and even understand the reason for slow performance,” continues Cejrowski.
Empowering Customers.
Tapad is always looking for new ways that brands, agencies, and marketers can leverage its solutions. By using Catchpoint, it can measure the end user experience around the world to provide granular insight into how its customers can best take advantage of the Tapad Graph.
“With Catchpoint, we can enable our customers to feel more in control and empowered to join their data with the Tapad Graph,” says Cejrowski.
Results
According to Cejrowski, Catchpoint’s impact is invaluable.
“Not only did we save money by going with proven Catchpoint active observability, but we are also achieving better results than we could have by building a solution in house,” he says.
Tapad also plans to take advantage of Catchpoint to further automate core processes. For example, by integrating its services with Catchpoint, Tapad can automatically run tests when onboarding new customers.
In addition, Tapad intends to use more of Catchpoint’s alerting features. The company currently uses Google Cloud to monitor response latency, and Catchpoint’s active observability complements this with performance data measured from the end user perspective.
“The integration of the two will provide us with more data points for fine-grained performance measurements,” Henriksen says. “We can combine that with our internal time series monitoring for an even better view into performance and outliers to accelerate debugging.”
In fact, Tapad is excited by all the possibilities at its fingertips with Catchpoint. “Catchpoint is easy for our engineers to learn because the user interface is so intuitive. As a result, Catchpoint empowers our team without friction,” he concludes.
