• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 13, 2017

Akamai is moving into optimization for campaigns and content by developing an adaptive learning engine that gathers real user and application data to determine how apps work in different situations and then automates changes in the process.

It feeds the data into the engine to better understand how applications differ across geographies, device types, browsers, and more, and then makes changes. The benefits also include the ability for marketers to manage content with autonomy and speed.

Akamai is a global delivery platform that has the ability to gather data across every major geography and every major network, both wireless and cellular. It has insights into the back end of the internet -- places where other provides cannot or will not go. The data can provide insights into speed and why campaigns and content do or do not perform.

It may seem somewhat technical, but for marketers the automation means pushing out app releases more quickly, and gives users a better experience when using the apps. This also means that marketers will not need to go back to the developers asking for changes, thus eliminating the backlog of automation tasks.

Akamai has also added media collections, so any marketer working on a digital advertising campaign can point the specific feature in Image Manager at the director where they pull their files and it will automatically optimize them, said Ari Weil, senior director of industry marketing at Akamai.

Marketers can now see how the images will look with cropping and more before they post in the app or on the web, Weil said.

Recently announced enhancements were made to the company's suite of Web Performance solutions to deliver a better web and mobile application experience. Akamai's DevOps alignment focuses on three key areas: enabling customers to deploy Akamai as code, providing real-time visibility into applications running on Akamai, and helping developers modify applications easily in production. 

"So many companies now focus on data," Weil said. "We're just trying to make sure they have as much as possible because those insights are important."

Akamai also announced this week that enhancements were made to the company's suite of Web Performance solutions to deliver a better web and mobile application experience. Akamai's DevOps alignment focuses on three key areas: enabling customers to deploy Akamai as code, providing real-time visibility into applications running on Akamai, and helping developers modify applications easily in production. 

The tools that help developers provide marketers with the data includes mPulse and the free version mPulse Light, which monitors user data. It's not always the slowest page that needs to be addressed, he said. The data can provide the means to see the correlation between the revenue and goal.

Akamai also released Bot Manager Premier, which provides advanced bot detection such as behavior anomaly analysis to find and stop web fraud, mobile SDKs to provide mobile apps from APIs and bot activity, and to find and manage different types of bots such as scrapers, and content aggregator. For retailers, this means they can stop gift card fraud.