At this time, Moloco Commerce Media requires the following data inputs.

Catalog feed

The catalog feed is a set of metadata that represents all the items on your marketplace (i.e., What items are the marketplace or online retailer selling?). Moloco uses the item metadata to create the campaign manager and train our machine-learning algorithms. Integration of catalog item metadata is delivered via a catalog feed, which synchronizes seller and item information. For detailed information, check out the catalog specifications.

User events

User events are the user/buyer activities that take place on a marketplace or online retailer, such as browsing a page, adding an item to the cart, buying an item, and more. Moloco’s ML engine uses this first party of data to deliver relevant ads to the right user at the right time. This is accomplished by sending user event data to the Moloco Commerce Media Event service API. See this guide for detailed information on user event data specifications.

Inventory configurations

An inventory is a slot or a place to display ads. It can be placed on the home page, search result page, product detail page, and so on. Every page has its own characteristics, so the inventory should fit within these pages. Reach out to your Moloco representative for more information about inventory requirements.

Campaign settings

The campaign is a logical set of advertisement configurations nested in the ad account. It consists of the content to advertise, start and end date, daily budget, and max bid price for your bidding strategy.

Ad serving configurations

Ad serving configurations determine who will see the ads in a given ad inventory.

Moloco Commerce Media uses the inputs for the following purposes: to train the ML models for your marketplace, and to predict the ad items or banners. The table below shows what data it uses for ad prediction or ML training.

ML training

The model is initially trained from two types of data: items and their specs (i.e., catalog feed) and what user sequences (i.e., user events) are seen in your marketplace now. We require approximately one week to train the initial model. Model training is continuous when you send the required event stream data to Moloco Commerce Media.

Ad Prediction

To give the proper response for your ad request, Moloco Commerce Media should be aware of where the ads are going to be displayed (Inventory configs), which ad campaigns are enabled and their configuration settings (Campaign settings), and who you want to show the ads and where (Ad serving configs).

Fetching sponsored ad items or banners requires inventory configurations, campaign settings, and ad serving configs for Moloco Commerce Media to process where your ads should appear, which campaigns to run, and which users to show your ads to on which section of the marketplace.

After our models have been fully trained on your marketplace data, you must call the Decision API to generate a list of ad items or banners with respective tracker URLs. These ad items or banners are displayed in the marketplace, and the tracker URLs record user clicks and impression data.

The trackers measure an ad campaign's effectiveness. Moloco Commerce Media has two types of trackers: an impression tracker and a click tracker. These are provided as URLs in the response to the ad decision request (Decision API call). See 6. Ad Serving and Tracking for more information.