***Note: this was written by an outside consultancy about DevHub - after interviews with sales, tech and customers. Some information contained may be considered proprietary.
Digital Agencies that work with brands supporting distributed advertising objectives face several unique challenges. They often need to drive traffic to hundreds, even thousands of similar, but unique sites. These sites may be customized with unique content (images, addresses, etc.) for a franchisee, affiliate or distributor.
They must maintain brand compliance across all these sites and they must also keep the sites tuned to changes in browser standards, device standards that impact mobile responsiveness, security standards, and changes by search providers like Google that impact SEO.
They must also monitor site performance – especially as it relates to their campaigns. They need to have their analytic tools in place so they can optimize ad spends.
These challenges create a bottleneck with IT. The IT staff at digital agencies and the brands they support are almost universally under-resourced. This creates a backlog that inhibits all sides from managing changes in a lean or agile fashion.
Over the past ten years DevHub has developed a unique set of tools and services aimed at these specific issues. DevHub Migrate takes the header, footer and graphics from the existing site to build a microsite for each affiliate. Photos, contact information and other content is then administered programmatically through a dashboard. This provides a low-cost platform to address brand compliance and changing standards during the site’s lifecycle. A second tool, DevHub Trace, is used by the agency that needs to migrate sites. It captures the page design and functionality of a legacy page, creating a new site that can be managed with a shared template.
The third tool, Reverse Proxy, may be DevHub’s most distinctive service. Used by digital agencies that service tens of thousands of sites, Reverse Proxy is used to quickly create mirrored sites with unique domains. Agencies can then leverage their internal tags and analytic services to measure campaign performance with all the detail they require. The client is free from having to administer analytic tags while protecting sensitive site data. Both sites avoid taxing their IT resources so campaigns deploy more quickly and with more limited costs.