zlavy.sme.sk

We delivered the zlavy.sme.sk project in cooperation with the publishing house Petit Press. On the Slovak internet, 2010 was marked by the rapid rise of so-called daily deals portals, which offered deep, time-limited discounts every day across a range of segments — both products and services.

Challenge

Within a few months, several dozen such portals were available, and their offerings were growing rapidly by the day. This created a need to aggregate, sort and clearly categorize these deals in one place. Petit Press had significant marketing space it wanted to put to use in this segment. The task was to build a web application that would display the deals clearly and serve as a platform for monetizing them — with marketing space that also included banners placed in the publisher’s main titles (e.g. sme.sk, korzar.sk and others).

Solution

The deals aggregator consisted of several modules, each handling a specific part of the job. One of the main ones was an XML parser that, at regular intervals, parsed the XML feeds from individual deals portals, validated them and automatically corrected the incoming data. The system then categorized new deals automatically. This was an ideal area for applying machine-learning methods, since categorization had until then been corrected by hand by an employee.

The biggest challenge on the project was building the monetization platform, which let the deals portals promote their offers effectively. We built a sophisticated deal-ranking system in which the order the deals appeared in was driven by an algorithm. It weighed and evaluated several aspects of how a deal was set up — for example, the cost per click, the commission rate and the quality of the deal in terms of how well it sold. All of these attributes were evaluated continuously, with the goal of maximizing the number of deals sold. The system also published Google AdSense-style advertising banners, which were used widely, especially on the news site sme.sk and its subprojects. Not least, the system managed a large mailing list that sent users new deals.

Because all content was generated in real time (pay per click, deal ranking, affiliate commissions), everything had to be dynamic and fast. On top of that, the application sent out more than one million emails a month.

Benefits for the client

The zlavy.sme.sk project became the largest and most visited daily deals aggregator in Slovakia. We also successfully launched a clone of zlavy.sme.sk in the Czech Republic, in cooperation with the media group MAFRA, under the name raketa.cz.